Research Article Towards an Improved Energy Efficient and End-to-End Secure Protocol for IoT Healthcare Applications Arshad Ahmad , 1,2 Ayaz Ullah, 2 Chong Feng , 1 Muzammil Khan , 3 Shahzad Ashraf, 4 Muhammad Adnan, 5 Shah Nazir , 2 and Habib Ullah Khan 6 1 School of Computer Science & Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China 2 Department of Computer Science, University of Swabi, Anbar, Pakistan 3 Department of Computer Science, University of Swat, Swat, Pakistan 4 College of Internet of ings Engineering, Hohai University, Changzhou, Jiangsu, China 5 Department of Computer Science, Abdul Wali Khan University, Mardan, Pakistan 6 Department of Accounting & Information Systems, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar Correspondence should be addressed to Chong Feng; fengchong@bit.edu.cn Received 22 July 2020; Revised 24 August 2020; Accepted 3 September 2020; Published 22 September 2020 Academic Editor: Amir Anees Copyright©2020ArshadAhmadetal.isisanopenaccessarticledistributedundertheCreativeCommonsAttributionLicense, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In this paper, we proposed LCX-MAC (local coordination X-MAC) as an extension of X-MAC. X-MAC is an asynchronous duty cycle medium access control (MAC) protocol. X-MAC used one important technique of short preamble which is to allow sender nodes to quickly send their actual data when the corresponding receivers wake up. X-MAC node keeps sending short preamble to wake up its receiver node, which causes energy, increases transmission delay, and makes the channel busy since a lot of short preambles are discarded, as these days Internet of ings (IoT) healthcare with different sensor nodes for the healthcare is time- critical applications and needs a quick response. A possible improvement over X-MAC is that local information of each node will share with its neighbour node. is local information exchanged will cause much less overhead than in the nodes which are synchronized. To calculate the effect of this the local coordination on X-MAC in this paper, we built an analytical model of LCX- MAC that incorporates the local coordination in X-MAC. e analytical results show that LCX-MAC outperformed X-MAC and X-MAC/BEB in terms of throughput, delay, and energy. 1. Introduction As with rapid development in IoT healthcare devices, a large amount of data is transmitted over limited energy resources, so there is a requirement for IoT healthcare environment which mostly consists of wireless sensor nodes that collect different data from the environment [1, 2]. MAC protocols with duty cycle mechanism have been established mainly for saving energy in IoT healthcare and wireless sensor networks (WSNs). IoT healthcare and WSNs have many numbers of nodes; each node has a transceiver and more than one sensor to monitor changes in the environment and send the sensed data to collection centre directly or through some middle nodes. As the events to inform infrequently occur, the node only wakes up periodically for a short time to send or receive data known as duty cycle mechanism. Node only wakes up for a short time and remains in the sleep mode most of the time. In the sleep mode, the node turns off transceiver to save energy by avoiding idle listening. us, a duty cycle in- terchanges an extended sleep time duration and a short wakeup time duration to save energy. MAC protocols with duty cycle behaviour are broadly divided into two categories, asynchronous and synchronous. Nodes in asynchronous MAC protocols randomly wakeup and keep sending preamble until its corresponding receivers become awake. Synchronous MAC protocols from time to time exchange their schedule information with their neighbour nodes. e first synchronous MAC protocol was S-MAC [3], and there are many modifications of S-MAC Hindawi Security and Communication Networks Volume 2020, Article ID 8867792, 10 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/8867792