Performance evaluation of direct and cooperative transmissions in body area networks

Abstract

Body area networks (BAN) offer amazing perspectives to instrument and support humans in many aspects of their life. Among all possible applications, this paper focuses on body monitoring applications having a body equipped with a set of sensors transmitting in real time their measures to a common sink. In this context, at the application level, the network fits with a star topology, which is quite usual in the broad scope of wireless networks. Unfortunately, the structure of the network at the physical layer is totally different. Indeed, due to the specificity of BAN radio channel features, all radio links are not stationary and all sensors suffer from link losses during independent time frames. In wireless networks, link losses are often coped with multi-hop transmission schemes to ensure a good connectivity. However, since the radio links are not stationary, the multi-hop routes should adapt quickly to BAN changes. We instead propose in this work a different approach based on opportunistic relaying. The concept relies on electing some sensors to support the transmission of other ones having a worst connection. Instead of changing the relay time to time, we rather select a relay node from a statistical perspective. We evaluate this approach from a theoretical point of view and on realistic simulations using the packet error rate outage probability as a performance criterion.

Modeling mobility and psychological stress based human postural changes in wireless body area networks

“…Furthermore, asynchronous wakeup trigger mode is proposed for emergency traffic and to minimize the energy consumption. Ferrand, Maman, Goursaud, Gorce, and Ouvry (2011) use star topology to monitor different parameters of the human body in WBANs. Due to dynamicity of human body, the link between nodes and sink might be disconnected which results in loss of data.…”

Decode and merge cooperative MAC protocol for intra WBAN communication

“…Moreover, the same authors extended their study and found that the opportunistic relaying reduces significantly interference [5]. Importance in setting this topology has been also explored by considering whether the WBAN PHY is narrow-band [6] - [7] or UWB [8] and in all these studies significant performance benefits have been achieved. However, no works on the two-hop topology for intra WBAN communication, have so far taken into consideration transmissions flow optimization.…”

Joint optimal relay location and power allocation for ultra-wideband-based wireless body area networks

“…This fact motivated us to study the SE of relay-assisted cooperative transmission in UWB-based WBANs. For cooperative transmission, some related studies have been conducted in WBANs [10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. Particularly, channel modeling and system diversity were analyzed in [10].…”

“…Cooperative scheduling schemes were proposed to decrease inter-BAN interference and increase packet reception rate of intra-BAN communications in [12]. In [13] and [14], packet error rate performance evaluation of two-hop links against the direct link was presented over narrow-band channels. In [15], the energy efficiency of cooperative transmission was considered from a relay selection perspective for UWB-based WBANs and the energy-efficient performance was analyzed with different relay regions.…”