Implementation and experimental evaluation of dynamic capabilities in wireless body area networks: different setting parameters and environments

Abstract

It is well known that a wireless body area network (WBAN) is a special proposed wireless sensor network (WSN) that can assist in monitoring physiological signals for the evaluation and planning of patient treatment. One of the most challenging issues for WBANs is communication reliability, with acceptable communication efficiency and packet loss. To obtain such network characteristics, collision-free data transmission in networks of wireless sensor nodes is an interesting research problem. In this paper, the experiments of dynamic capabilities in several WBAN scenarios are focused, where the novelty and major contribution of our tests is that the effects of packet inter-arrival times, packet sizes, and the number of nodes deployed in the network, including human movements, indoor and outdoor environments, and transmitter and receiver positions, are all taken into consideration and evaluated. This is achieved by implementing the WBAN using IEEE 802.15.4 low-power sensor nodes. Experimental results illustrate the significant factors that impact the communication reliability of WBANs as measured by the packet delivery ratio (PDR). The experimental results show that the diverse environment testbed can affect network performance for WBAN data transmission. Our findings also show that the best network reliability needs to be set at more than 15 ms in packet interval time to achieve over 90% PDR for every test scenario. More details of the experimental results related to WBAN reliability obtained from all test cases are also discussed and summarized in the paper. To the best of our knowledge, our findings can be useful for users and researchers to consider the optimal point for WBAN setting and configuration to achieve the communication reliability requirements and also to deploy and develop a more reliable WBAN system.