Broadcast Strategies and Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 in Wireless Body Area Networks WBAN

TL;DR

This paper evaluates broadcast strategies in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN), revealing that DTN-based methods are inadequate and proposing a new strategy that improves delay, coverage, and energy efficiency.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel broadcast strategy tailored for WBAN that outperforms existing DTN-inspired methods in key performance metrics.

Findings

Existing DTN strategies perform poorly in WBAN scenarios.

The proposed strategy reduces end-to-end delay and energy consumption.

Simulations show improved network coverage with the new approach.

Abstract

The rapid advances in sensors and ultra-low power wireless communication has enabled a new generation of wireless sensor networks: Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). To the best of our knowledge the current paper is the first to address broadcast in WBAN. We first analyze several broadcast strategies inspired from the area of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN). The proposed strategies are evaluated via the OMNET++ simulator that we enriched with realistic human body mobility models and channel models issued from the recent research on biomedical and health informatics. Contrary to the common expectation, our results show that existing research in DTN cannot be transposed without significant modifications in WBANs area. That is, existing broadcast strategies for DTNs do not perform well with human body mobility. However, our extensive simulations give valuable insights and directions for designing efficient broadcast in WBAN. Furthermore, we propose a novel broadcast strategy that outperforms the existing ones in terms of end-to-end delay, network coverage and energy consumption. Additionally, we performed investigations of independent interest related to the ability of all the studied strategies to ensure the total order delivery property when stressed with various packet rates. These investigations open new and challenging research directions.