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

Abstract

The rapid advances in sensors and ultra-low power wireless communication has\nenabled a new generation of wireless sensor networks: Wireless Body Area\nNetworks (WBAN). To the best of our knowledge the current paper is the first to\naddress broadcast in WBAN. We first analyze several broadcast strategies\ninspired from the area of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN). The proposed\nstrategies are evaluated via the OMNET++ simulator that we enriched with\nrealistic human body mobility models and channel models issued from the recent\nresearch on biomedical and health informatics. Contrary to the common\nexpectation, our results show that existing research in DTN cannot be\ntransposed without significant modifications in WBANs area. That is, existing\nbroadcast strategies for DTNs do not perform well with human body mobility.\nHowever, our extensive simulations give valuable insights and directions for\ndesigning efficient broadcast in WBAN. Furthermore, we propose a novel\nbroadcast strategy that outperforms the existing ones in terms of end-to-end\ndelay, network coverage and energy consumption. Additionally, we performed\ninvestigations of independent interest related to the ability of all the\nstudied strategies to ensure the total order delivery property when stressed\nwith various packet rates. These investigations open new and challenging\nresearch directions.\n