Home // International Journal On Advances in Internet Technology, volume 2, number 1, 2009 // View article

Analyzing and Improving Reliability in Multi-hop Body Sensor Networks

Authors:
Bart Braem
Benoît Latré
Chris Blondia
Ingrid Moerman
Piet Demeester

Keywords: health care, routing protocols, network reliability,wireless sensor networks, BSN, CICADA, cross-layer multi-hop protocol, medium access protocol, path loss model

Abstract:
Body Sensor Networks are an interesting emerging application of wireless sensor networks to improve healthcare and the Quality of Life. Current research has mainly focused on single-hop networks, although some works clearly show advantages of multi-hop architectures. In this paper, we model probabilistic connectivity in such multi-hop body sensor networks. Instead of using a circular coverage area, a more accurate model is defined based on the path loss along the human body. Further, we propose improvements to CICADA, a cross-layer multi-hop protocol that handles both medium access and the routing of data in BSNs. CICADA is slot-based and uses schemes to allocate these slots. Results for two reliability improvements are given: randomization of the schemes and repeating the schemes received from a parent node. We show that these improvements positively affect the throughput of the network and lead to fewer retransmissions while the energy consumption of the nodes is hardly influenced.

Pages: 151 to 161

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2009. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 7, 2009

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2652