Performance improvement of the wireless body area network (WBAN)

Abstract

The introduction of the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) grows significantly regarding its flexibility, accuracy, costs efficiency and mobility. It supports a huge range of innovative applications that improve the quality of life and enhance services. In the health care system, the majority of WBAN applications are responsible of handling critical data in order to monitor the patient health state and to save his live in many cases. That's why WBAN should efficiently deliver patient's vital signs to specialized medical entity (doctor, emergency, ‥). However, the particular architecture of WBAN and the movement patterns of the body part affect the communication quality. Moreover, the number of WBAN nodes increases the contention level to access to the shared wireless medium; this consequently produces packets collisions and the loss of critical data. We evaluated in this article the performance of the WBAN within different scenarios. We investigated different effects of the number of nodes as well as the different body state (standing, running) on the WBAN's reliability. We, finally, proposed a simple, no cost and convenient Adaptive Transmit Power Mechanism (ATPM) to improve the WBAN link quality without consuming unnecessary energy.