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SUMMARYIn this paper, we investigate the energy efficiency of an incremental relay based cooperative communication scheme in wireless body area networks (WBANs). We derive analytical expressions for the energy efficiency of direct and cooperative communication schemes taking into account the effect of packet error rate. The following communication scenarios specific to a WBAN are considered: (i) in‐body communication between an implant sensor node and the gateway, and (ii) on‐body communication between a body surface node and the gateway with line‐of‐sight (LOS) and non‐LOS channels. The results reveal a threshold behavior that separates regions where direct transmission is better from regions where incremental relay cooperation is more useful in terms of energy efficiency. It is observed that, compared with direct communication, incremental relay based cooperative communication schemes improves the energy efficiency significantly. Further, cooperation extends the source‐to‐destination hop length over, which energy efficient communication can be achieved as compared with direct communication. We also observe that, for both direct as well as cooperative transmission schemes in error prone channels, an optimal packet size exists that result in maximum energy efficiency. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

IEEE 802.11p is an approved amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard to facilitate wireless access in vehicular environments (WAVE). In this article, we present an analytical model to evaluate the impact of vehicle mobility on the saturation throughput of IEEE 802.11p-based vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) networks. The throughput model is then used to investigate an unfairness problem that exists in such networks among vehicles with different mobility characteristics. Assuming a saturated network, if all the vehicles in the network use the same MAC parameters, IEEE 802.11p MAC protocol provides equal transmission opportunity for all of them, provided they have equal residence time in the coverage area of a road side unit (RSU). When vehicles have different mobility characteristics (e.g., extremely high and low speeds), they do not have similar chances of channel access. A vehicle moving with higher velocity has less chance to communicate with its RSU, as compared to a slow moving vehicle, due to its short residence time in the coverage area of RSU. Accordingly, the data transfer of a higher velocity vehicle gets degraded significantly, as compared to that of the vehicle with lower velocity, resulting in unfairness among them. In this article, our aim is to address this unfairness problem that exists among vehicles of different velocities in V2I networks. Analytical expressions are derived for optimal minimum CW (CW min ) required to ensure fairness, in the sense of equal chance of communicating with RSU, among competing vehicles of different mean velocities in the network. Analytical results are validated using extensive simulations.

A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a highly mobile wireless ad hoc network formed by vehicles equipped with communication facilities. Developing multihop communication in VANETs is a challenging problem because of rapidly changing network topology and frequent network disconnections. This paper investigates the network connectivity probability of one-dimensional VANET in the presence of channel randomness. Network connectivity is one of the most important issues in VANETs, because the dissemination of time-critical information requires, as a preliminary condition, the network to be fully connected. We present an analytical procedure for the computation of network connectivity probability, taking into account the underlying wireless channel. Three different fading models are considered for the connectivity analysis: Rayleigh, Rician, and Weibull. A distance-dependent power law model is employed for the pathloss in a vehicle-to-vehicle channel. Furthermore, the speed of each vehicle on the highway is assumed to be a Gaussian distributed random variable. The analysis provides a general framework for investigating the dependence of various parameters such as vehicle arrival rate, vehicle density, vehicle speed, highway length, and various physical layer parameters such as transmit power, receive signal-to-noise ratio threshold, path loss exponent, and fading factors (Rician and Weibull) on VANET connectivity.

In this paper, we investigate packet size optimization to improve energy ef ciency of cooperative Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). We present models for the packet error rate and the energy ef ciency of ARQ scheme for direct as well as cooperative communication scheme. We then consider the packet size optimization for both the transmission schemes. The theoretical analysis and the numerical evaluations reveal that cooperative transmission scheme improves the energy ef ciency, increases the optimal payload packet size, and extends the hop length, as compared to direct communication for all scenarios of WBANs that includes both in-body as well as on-body propagation models.