Evaluation of MAC Protocols for Vital Sign Monitoring within Smart Home Environment

One of the appealing applications of smart home is remote monitoring of vital signs, such as heart and respiratory, which has gained more attention during the last two decades. The recent developments in IoT, sensing devices, and smart technologies increased the demand for such technology due to the need for devices that can continuously monitor physiological signals and offer further analysis and interpretations. Real-time monitoring systems record, measure, and monitor the vital sign activity for several reasons, such as early detection of heart problems, patient watching and athlete’s issues, This requires the use of MAC (medium access control) protocol which helps in the identification of several issues in the operation of medical sensors, such as traffic identification and sensing, collision detection, and the availability of free channels. In this paper, a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP)-based algorithm is proposed for the performance analysis of several MAC protocols that are intended for monitoring medical signal in the human body, such as vital signals. Five different protocols were analyzed according to several performance metrics using a quantitative ranking based on the proposed algorithm. The work concludes by suggesting a new protocol that combines the two most efficient ones and taking advantage of the features of each.