Wireless Techniques for Body-Centric Cooperative Communications

Body-centric and cooperative communications are new trends in telecommunications field. Being concerned with human behaviour, body-centric communication networks, also known as Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), are suitable for a wide variety of applications. The advances in the miniaturisation of embedded devices to be placed on or around the body, foster the diffusion of these systems, where the human body is the key element defining communication characteristics. Cooperative communications paradigm, on the other hand, is one of the emerging technologies that promises significantly higher reliability and spectral efficiency in wireless networks. This thesis investigates possible applications of the cooperative communication paradigm to body-centric networks and, more generally, to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Firstly, communication protocols for WBANs are in the spotlight. Performance achieved by different approaches is evaluated and compared through experimentation providing guidelines for choosing appropriate protocol and setting protocol parameters to meet application requirements. Secondly, a cooperative Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) scheme for WBANs is presented. The scheme, named B-MIMO, exploits the natural heterogeneity of the WBAN propagation channel to improve energy efficiency of the system. Finally, a WSN scenario is considered, where sensor nodes cooperate to establish a massive MIMO-like system. The analysis and subsequent optimisation show the advantages of cooperation in terms of energy efficiency and provide insights on how many nodes should be deployed in such a scenario

Experimental characterization of Low Power Listening in BAN

This paper presents an implementation of a Low Power Listening-based (LPL) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol on a platform for Body Area Network (BAN) applications. LPL exploits the transmission of a burst of short packets, called preambles, to synchronize the transmitter and the receiver. In this way, devices are able to spend most of the time in sleeping mode, providing longer lifetime and energy saving. Experiments on the field have been conducted by considering different scenarios and results, in terms of average energy consumed per packet, packet loss rate and average delay, have been investigated. Conclusions regarding the proper parameters setting depending on the application requirements were derived. This work has been performed in the framework of the FP7 Integrated Project, WiserBAN