Concepedia

The Wireless Autonomous Spanning tree Protocol for Multihop Wireless Body Area Networks

Bart Braem, Benoît Latré, Ingrid Moerman, Chris Blondia, Piet Demeester

2006 · 137 citations · 15 references

TL;DR

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are increasingly used for medical monitoring, but existing single‑hop designs are energy‑inefficient; recent work shows that multihop topologies are more energy‑efficient and necessary near the human body due to severe propagation loss. The paper proposes the Wireless Autonomous Spanning Tree Protocol (WASP), a slotted multihop MAC and routing scheme for WBANs. WASP achieves efficient distributed coordination by employing cross‑layer techniques and controls traffic through a spanning‑tree topology that exchanges broadcast messages between parent and child nodes. Simulation results demonstrate WASP’s performance characteristics.

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have gained a lot of interest in the world of medical monitoring. Current implementations generally use a large single hop network to connect all sensors to a personal server. However recent research pointed out that multihop networks are more energy-efficient and even necessary when applied near the human body with inherent severe propagation loss. In this paper we present a slotted multihop approach to medium access control and routing in wireless body area networks, the wireless autonomous spanning tree protocol or WASP. It uses crosslayer techniques to achieve efficient distributed coordination of the separated wireless links. Traffic in the network is controlled by setting up a spanning tree and by broadcasting scheme messages over it that are used both by the parent and the children of each node in the tree. We analyze the performance of WASP and show the simulation results