Convergecast in Wireless Body Area Networks

Wafa Badreddine (1) , Nesrine Khernane (2) , Maria Potop-Butucaru (1) , Claude Chaudet (3)

1 NPA - Networks and Performance Analysis
2 FEMTO-ST - Franche-Comté Électronique Mécanique, Thermique et Optique - Sciences et Technologies (UMR 6174)
3 Télécom ParisTech

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) is a recent challenging area in the domain of health monitoring. There are several concerns in this area ranging from energy efficient communication to designing delays efficient protocols that support nodes dynamicity induced by human body mobility. This paper focuses on the convergecast or data gathering protocols in WBAN. Our contribution is twofold. First, we extensively analyze the impact of postural body mobility on various classes of multi-hop convergecast strategies. Our study does not limit itself to the existing state-of-the-art in WBAN, we adapted to WBAN settings strategies from the areas of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). We evaluate all these strategies 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. Our simulations show that existing results in DTN and WSN cannot be just extrapolated to WBAN without a deeper investigation. That is, existing convergecast strategies for DTN or WSN do not perform well with postural body movements because of the topological partitioning provoked by important link attenuations due to signal obstructions by clothes or body itself. Our extensive simulations give valuable insights and directions for designing efficient convergecast adaptive strategies in WBAN. Second, we propose and evaluate two novel classes of convergecast strategies. The first class integrates in the routing information the link attenuation while the second one exploits multi (pre-established) paths to the sink node. We stress all the strategies under a realistic channel model and present an extensive analysis in terms of resiliency to mobility, end-to-end delay and energy consumption for seven different mobility patterns. We advocate that, so far, there is no strategy for convergecast in WBAN that optimizes all the above criteria for all possible mobility patterns. However, each considered strategy can be a good candidate for a specific combination of parameters with a specific mobility pattern.

Mots clés: WBAN; Convergecast; mobility model; Omnet++

Domaines: Performance et fiabilité [cs.PF]

Wafa Badreddine, Nesrine Khernane, Maria Potop-Butucaru, Claude Chaudet. Convergecast in Wireless Body Area Networks. Ad Hoc Networks, 2017, 66, pp.40-51. ⟨10.1016/j.adhoc.2017.08.008⟩. ⟨hal-01301773⟩