Effects of sensor-to-sensor link modeling on body area network simulations

Abstract

A typical Body Area Network (BAN) involves multiple on-body sensors exchanging information with a central gateway, forming a star topology network. The characterization of sensor-to-gateway wireless links is clearly important in simulation, as indicated by substantial research efforts to collect experimental traces and model them. Sensor-to-sensor links on the other hand, have received less attention, due to the fact that there is no immediate communication between sensors and, at the same time, it is expensive to collect experimental traces for all node combinations. Nevertheless, these links affect communication when contention-based access protocols are considered, therefore creating a modeling need. In this paper we investigate models for sensor-to-sensor links, in simulation scenarios which employ two established communication standards, namely 802.15.4 and 802.15.6. These standards rely on a mix of CSMA and TDMA to enable wireless communication between sensors and the gateway. We show that sensor-to-sensor links are indeed important in simulation, and investigate the effect of different modeling approaches on application layer results and computational overhead. Moreover, we show the correspondence between two different modeling approaches and suggest the simpler one is sufficient to carry out simulation studies over a wide range of scenarios.