Markovian Model for Broadcast in Wireless Body Area Networks

International audienceWireless body area networks became recently a vast field of investigation. A large amount of research in this field is dedicated to the evaluation of various communication protocols, e.g., broadcast or convergecast, against human body mobility. Most of the time this evaluation is done via simulations and in many situations only synthetic data is used for the human body mobility. In this paper we propose for the first time in Wireless Body Area Networks a Markovian analytical model specifically designed for WBAN networks. The main objective of the model is to evaluate the efficiency of a multi-hop transmission in the case of a diffusion-based broadcast protocol, with respect to various performance parameters (e.g., cover probability, average cover number, hitting probability or average cover time). We validate our model by comparing its results to simulation and show its accuracy. Finally, but not least, we show how our model can be used to analytically evaluate the trade-off between transmission power and redundancy, when the same message is broadcasted several times in order to increase the broadcast reliability while maintaining a low transmission power

Broadcast strategies and performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 in wireless body area networks WBAN

International audienceWireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) can be considered as an evolution of wireless sensor networks towards wearable and implanted technologies. Radio propagation and mobility are particular in this context, as they are influenced by the characteristics and movement of the human body and by the necessity to keep the transmission power at its minimum to save energy and limit interactions with the wearer.In this paper, we investigate the broadcasting problem in which a node, typically the gateway, tries to send a packet to all other nodes in the network at minimal cost. This problem is not as trivial as it looks and we show through simulation that forwarding strategies coming from the Delay Tolerant Networks world cannot be transposed without adaptation. We enriched the Omnet++ simulator with a WBAN-specific channel model from the literature, and use this model to evaluate 9 classes of broadcasting algorithms, including our own proposals, with respect to their ability to cover the whole network, their completion delay, their cost in terms of transmissions volume and their capability to preserve multiple packets order (i.e. total order broadcast).Our study shows that there is a subtle compromise to find between verbose strategies that achieve good performance at the cost of numerous transmissions, ultimately provoking collisions and more cautious solutions that miss transmission opportunities because of mobility

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

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

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

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