Abstract
Wearable wireless body area network (WBAN) has attracted considerable attention as a means to collect vital data in sports training and urgent life-critical scenarios, which requires high reliability in links from sensor nodes to a central coordinator. Herein, cooperative relaying, which means retransmission not by sensor nodes themselves but through their cooperators, works effectively, since human postures do not suddenly change the states of the links in quite a short duration such as a retransmission interval. In this paper, we propose a cooperator-assisted WBAN for real-time vital data collection. We show that the WBAN is realizable based on two kinds of medium access control (MAC) protocols such as a hybrid-time divison multiple access/carrier sense multiple access (TDMA/CSMA) and a TDMA, both of which are compliant with the IEEE 802.15.4.e standard, and evaluate the packet error rates and power consumptions for a hybrid-TDMA/CSMA-based WBAN and a TDMA-based WBAN. In the evaluation of packet error rates, we use the stored received signal strength indication (RSSI) data, which were obtained from experiments with three subjects in a realistic scenario composed of a series of different actions and postures in a mixed-indoor/outdoor environment.
Highlights
Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a short-range network for connecting nodes on a human body or in a human body
Because of the short transmittable range, typically, less than 2 m, and the low transmission power, typically, less than 0.1 mW, a star topology has been mainly considered in WBANs, connecting a central WBAN coordinator (BANCO) to sensor nodes put on different positions of a human body [1]
We propose the use of low latency deterministic network (LLDN) in the IEEE 802.15.4e standard [21] for realizing a cooperator-assisted WBAN [22], where we show two superframe designs using a time division multiple access (TDMA) and a hybrid-TDMA/carrier sense multiple access (CSMA)
Summary
Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a short-range network for connecting nodes on a human body (wearable WBAN) or in a human body (implant WBAN). For WBANs assuming the IEEE 802.15.4 standard in the same frequency band [13], the advantage of relaying is suggested [14], and the performance is investigated [15, 16] These works show the effectivity of cooperative transmission in WBANs, but their targets are all to improve the energy efficiency for prolonging the lifetime of the networks, which are common to those in general wireless sensor networks. We propose the use of low latency deterministic network (LLDN) in the IEEE 802.15.4e standard [21] for realizing a cooperator-assisted WBAN [22], where we show two superframe designs using a TDMA and a hybrid-TDMA/CSMA These two designs introduce different power consumptions, so using the values of power consumptions for a typical transceiver module, we compare the power consumptions between them.
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