Two-tier WBAN/WLAN healthcare networks; priority considerations.

In this work, by bridging the IEEE 802.15.6-based WBANs and the IEEE 802.11e EDCA-based WLAN we develop a wireless healthcare network. We assign 8 WBAN User Priorities (UPs) to the WBAN nodes. By mapping the UPs into 4 WLAN Access Categories (ACs) we convey the medical data to the WLAN access point. We investigate the network performance under varying priority differentiation and number of nodes in the WLAN. We study the impacts of AC differentiation by Arbitrary Inter-Frame Space (AIFS) and Contention Window (CW) on the performance of WBAN and regular WLAN nodes. The results of this work indicate that differentiation by AIFS is more appropriate to preserve relative order of frame response times established in WBAN.