In this paper we are concerned with the problem of data forwarding from a wireless body area network (WBAN) to a gateway when body shadowing affects the ability of WBAN nodes to communicate with the gateway. To solve this problem we present a new WBAN architecture that uses two communication technologies. One network is formed between on-body nodes, and is realized with capacitive body-coupled communication (BCC), while an IEEE 802.15.4 radio frequency (RF) network is used for forwarding data to the gateway. WBAN nodes that have blocked RF links due to body shadowing forward their data through the BCC link to a node that acts as a relay and has an active RF connection. For this architecture we design a network layer protocol that manages the two communication technologies and is responsible for relay selection and data forwarding. Next, we develop analytical performance models of the medium access control (MAC) protocols of the two independent communication links in order to be used for driving the decisions of the previous algorithms. Finally, the analytical models are used for further optimizing energy and delay efficiency. We test our system under different configurations first by performing simulations and next by using real RF traces.
In this paper we deal with the problem of optimizing data delivery from a WBAN to a gateway. The problem is challenging because communication between on-body and off-body nodes is very unreliable @cite_6 @cite_27 . The most promising way to attack the problem is through cooperation between WBAN nodes @cite_30 . With cooperation the nodes that aid in forwarding the data of other nodes are the . There is a plethora of works that focus on selecting the optimal relay in the general case of wireless sensor networks (WSN) by considering different optimization objectives, while fewer works have focused in WBANs.
@cite_30 @cite_27 @cite_6
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A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) consists of different tiny physiological wearable sensors to monitor the vital signs of a human body and these sensor nodes transmit in real-time the sensed physiological information to the on-body coordinator or server over a wireless medium. Any radio frequency based wireless device suffers from interference due to the existence of other wireless devices operating in the same frequency band. In this paper we address the problem of interference when multiple WBANs come in the proximity of one another. We propose a TDMA-based solution that creates a common schedule between these WBANs, so that there is seamless communication with their sensors without interference among them, while increasing the cost of latency per node. Also, when these TDMA based WBANs come in the close proximity of one another, they sense the existence of other interfering WBANs. Our solution proposed a scheme that defines the time when to exchange their TDMA schedules. We simulated the proposed solution using NS-3 network simulator and it is observed that there is improvement in the percentage of packet delivery by using the proposed scheme. It is also observed that the increase of speed of WBANs leads to decrease in the percentage of packet delivery. In this paper, a cooperative two-hop communication scheme, together with opportunistic relaying (OR), is applied within a mobile wireless body area network (WBAN). Its effectiveness in interference mitigation is investigated in a scenario where there are multiple closely-located networks. Due to a typical WBAN's nature, no coordination is used among different WBANs. A suitable time-division-multiple-access (TDMA) scheme is adopted as both an intra-network and also an internetwork access scheme. Extensive on-body and off-body channel gain measurements are employed to gauge performance, which are overlaid to simulate a realistic WBAN working environment. It is found that opportunistic relaying is able to improve the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) performance at an outage probability of 10 by an average of 5 dB, and it is also shown that it can reduce level crossing rate (LCR) significantly at low SINRs. Furthermore, this scheme is more efficient when on-body channels fade more rapidly. In this paper, coexistence of multiple mobile wireless body area networks (WBANs), where there is no coordination between WBANs, is investigated for the case where the WBAN-of-interest employs cooperative communications. A decode-and-forward protocol with two dual-hop links, two relays and selection combining (SC) at the hub (or gateway device) is chosen for the WBAN-of-interest. A suitable time-division-multiple-access (TDMA) scheme is used, enabling intra-network and inter-network operation, to allocate slots for each Tx Rx link packet transmission. Realistic channel models are employed with various amounts of shadowing, small-scale fading and white noise introduced between WBANs. For the WBAN-of-interest, many hours of measured channel gain data is employed to emulate the channel for this WBAN. It is found that the chosen cooperative communications provides significantly better co-channel interference mitigation than single-link star topology WBAN communications in a mobile, dynamic, scenario, hence the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for 10 outage probability at the hub is greatly improved by up-to 12 dB. It is also demonstrated that the location of the hub, given three typical locations, has significant impact on the performance of the cooperative WBAN communications. In this paper, the problem of efficient operation of an energy-constrained, heterogeneous Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) to optimize an activity detection application is addressed. WBANs constitute a new class of wireless sensor networks that enable diverse applications in healthcare, entertainment, sports, military and emergency situations. A typical WBAN consists of a few, heterogeneous sensors wirelessly coupled to an energy-constrained fusion center which, according to observations of a real-world prototype WBAN, imposes critical restrictions on system lifetime. To address this issue, a novel stochastic control framework is introduced, which considers both sensor heterogeneity and application requirements, for achieving the two-fold goal: energy savings with satisfactory detection performance. An optimal dynamic programming algorithm for the sensor selection problem is also derived. Important properties of the cost functionals are derived and used to design three approximation algorithms, which offer near optimal performance with significant complexity reduction. Simulations on real-world data show energy gains as high as 68 in comparison to an equal allocation scheme with probability of detection error on the order of 10-4.