An approach to investigate the best location for the central node placement for energy efficient WBAN

Abstract

WBAN has been gaining wide interest as it enables continuous and real-time monitoring of applications like healthcare, sports, entertainment and military. IEEE 802.15.6 is the IEEE WBAN standard supporting low power wireless communication in and around the human body. On-body WBAN comprises of several nodes deployed on the human body to measure various physiological data and further forward it to the central node. For efficient working of WBAN, the central node which may act as the gateway is preferably placed on the body itself. In this work for the considered scenarios best location for the central node is computed using Reflection Coefficient (S11) of an antenna positioned on the body and IEEE 802.15.6 CM3A path loss model between the communicating nodes. Considering a steady position of the body in the laboratory, computations have been carried out by using a standard λ/4 microstrip monopole patch ultra-wideband antenna attached with a vector network analyzer (VNA). Various parameters are evaluated from the measured data and compared to investigate the effect of different node positions on WBAN performance and hence explore best suitable location for the central node.