Skip to main content
Log in

Analysis of Fairness Problem for IEEE 802.15.6 Slotted Aloha Algorithm

  • Published:
Wireless Personal Communications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The IEEE 802.15.6 slotted Aloha protocol defines a contention based medium access mechanism for wireless body area network (WBAN). However the proposed scheme can cause a high collision rate when the number of nodes increases, thus decreasing overall throughput severely, especially in saturated traffic. In order to decrease collision rate, we can modify the protocol such that the contention probability of each node can be decreased as small as possible when the collision is repeated. This modification decreases the collision rate considerably improving the overall throughput, but with the sacrifice of fairness resulting in the starvation of some of the nodes. Recently, an algorithm, called Beta-decrement algorithm, has been proposed, which shows a reasonable amount of throughput while maintaining relatively good fairness among nodes. In this paper, we rigorously analyze the relationship between the throughput and fairness in the modified slotted aloha algorithm, and show why conventional solutions could not satisfy both requirements simultaneously but the Beta-decrement algorithm can.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. For some rows, such as experimentation 1, 5, 9, and 10, node 1 seems to occupy more time slots than node 2, but these were only the first top 10 states in terms of visiting counts, and the following states, which are not shown in the table, show that node 2 also occupies enough time slots.

  2. We didn’t differentiate between phase 1 and phase 2 in Tables 6, 7, 8 and 9 in contrast to Table 5 where each state is split into phase 1 and phase 2 and the visit count of each phase is shown separately.

  3. In Table 9, the visit count drops relatively sharply at 5th column. It is because we have shown the top 4 maximum visit count states by node 4 in the first four columns and for the rest of the columns the 6 maximum visit count states by other nodes. Contrast to other cases, node 4 in this case occupies all of top 10 maximum visit count states, and in order to show the visit count of other nodes we limited the visit count of node 4 to first four states.

References

  1. Chowdhury, M. S., Ashrafuzzaman, K., & Kwak, K. S. (2014). Modeling IEEE 802.15.6 slotted Aloha in heterogeneous condition. Electronics Letters, 5, 415–416.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Chowdhury, M. S., Ashrafuzzaman, K., & Kwak, K. S. (2014). Saturation throughput analysis of IEEE 802.15.6 slotted aloha in heterogeneous conditions. IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, 3, 257–260.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Elias, J. (2014). Optimal design of energy-efficient and cost-effective Wireless Body Area Networks. Ad Hoc Networks, 1, 560–574.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Fatehy, M., & Kohno, R. (2013). Analytical Markov model for IEEE 802.15.6 slotted aloha MAC’, Transactions of Japanese Society for. Medical and Biological Engineering, 51, 323.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Fatehy, M., & Kohno, R. (2014). A novel contention probability dynamism for IEEE 802.15.6 standard. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, 1, 92.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Hazewinkel, M. (1994). Jacobi method, Encyclopedia of Mathematics. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Hwang, J., Kim, J., & Kim, K. (2017). Beta-decrement of contention probability to enhance Both Fairness and throughput in IEEE 802.15.6 slotted aloha algorithm. Wireless Personal Communications. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-017-4595-3.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Khan, P., Ullah, N., Ali, F., Hong Y.S., Lee, K.Y., & Kim, H. (2017). Performance analysis of different backoff algorithms for WBAN-based emerging sensor networks. Sensors, 17(3).

  9. Kahsay, L., Paso T. & Iinatti J. (2013). Evaluation of IEEE 802.15.6 MAC user priorities with UWB PHY for medical application. In International symposium in medical information and communication technology.

  10. Kar, K., Sarkar, S., & Tassiulas, L. (2004). Achieving proportional fairness using local information in Aloha networks. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 49(10), 1858–1862.

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  11. Kim, B. & Cho, J. (2012). A novel priority-based channel access algorithm for contention-based MAC Protocol in WBANs’. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on ubiquitous information management and communication, Kuala Lumpur, (pp. 20–22).

  12. Liu, R., Wang, Y., Shu, M. & Wu, S. (2017). Throughput assurance of wireless body area networks coexistence based on stochastic geometry. PLOS ONE 12(1).

  13. Ma, R. T. B., Misra, V., & Rubenstein, D. (2008). An analysis of generalized slotted-aloha protocols. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 17(3), 936–949.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Part 15.6: ‘Wireless body area networks’, IEEE Standard for Local and metropolitan area networks, IEEE Standard 802.15.6-2012.

  15. Rashwand, S., Misic, J. & Khazaei, H. (2011). Performance analysis of IEEE 802.15. 6 under saturation condition and error-prone channel. In IEEE wireless communications and networking Conf. Mexico, (pp. 1167–172).

  16. Shurman, M. M., Al-Mistarihi, M. F. & Alomari, Z. A. (2013). MAC layer back-off algorithm for ad hoc networks. In Proceedings of the 36th international convention on information & communication technology, electronics & microelectronics (MIPRO), Opatija, Croatia, (pp. 446–451).

  17. Wang, D., Comaniciu, C., & Tureli, U. (2007). Cooperation and Fairness for Slotted Aloha. Wireless Personal Communications, 43(1), 13–27.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Tachtatzis, C., Franco, F. D., Tracey, D. C., Timmons, N. F., & Morrison, J. (2012). An energy analysis of IEEE 802.15.6 scheduled access modes for medical applications, LNCS Ad-hoc. Networks, 89, 209–222.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Zhang, Y., Zhang B. & Zhang, S. (2017). A lifetime maximization relay selection scheme in wireless body area networks. Sensors.

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Inha University.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kichang Kim.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Yoo, S., Kim, K. Analysis of Fairness Problem for IEEE 802.15.6 Slotted Aloha Algorithm. Wireless Pers Commun 102, 559–581 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-018-5858-3

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-018-5858-3

Keywords

Navigation