An Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Communication Scheme for Body Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes AFTCS, an adaptive fault-tolerant communication scheme for body sensor networks that improves reliability and reduces packet loss and latency during channel impairments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel adaptive scheme with bandwidth reservation and priority queueing to enhance data transmission reliability in BSNs.

Findings

Reduces packet loss rate during channel impairments

Lowers latency for critical sensors

Improves overall reliability of data transmission

Abstract

A high degree of reliability for critical data transmission is required in body sensor networks (BSNs). However, BSNs are usually vulnerable to channel impairments due to body fading effect and RF interference, which may potentially cause data transmission to be unreliable. In this paper, an adaptive and flexible fault-tolerant communication scheme for BSNs, namely AFTCS, is proposed. AFTCS adopts a channel bandwidth reservation strategy to provide reliable data transmission when channel impairments occur. In order to fulfill the reliability requirements of critical sensors, fault-tolerant priority and queue are employed to adaptively adjust the channel bandwidth allocation. Simulation results show that AFTCS can alleviate the effect of channel impairments, while yielding lower packet loss rate and latency for critical sensors at runtime.