Performance analysis of an access scheme based on exhaustive polling for WBAN

Abstract

The wireless sensor networks — RSSFs are composed of a large number of distributed nodes, reduced dimensions that work together to perform a task. This type of network has been the subject of intensive research, and has applicability in several areas, such as environment monitoring, robotics and in the medical field. This paper deals with the application of wireless sensor networks in the medical field, specifically in monitoring of vital signs of patients. A study of an access scheme using exhaustive polling technique for wireless body sensor network — WBAN is carried out in this paper. It is an alternative method for saving energy of sensor nodes. The influence of the buffer sizes of sensor nodes in relation to the transfer time and packet loss is investigated. These parameters are metrics in general used in computer networks to measure the QoS. Several scenarios were simulated taking into account the sizes of buffer of sensor nodes that directly influence the transfer time and packet loss, which are essentials for WBAN requiring real time processing. The study is carried out using a simulator developed in Matlab that generates and analyzes data based on exhaustive polling technique. The results obtained are initially compared to existing theoretical results and other results are obtained to define the most appropriate buffer size for WBAN.