A cooperative transmission scheme for real-time data gathering in a Wireless Body Area Network

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has drawn considerable attention as a means to gather vital data from on-body sensors. In WBAN, however, a star network topology is mainly supported, connecting a central coordinator to vital sensor nodes put on different positions of a human body, so the links between the coordinator and the sensor nodes are often blocked by parts of the human body when the man takes different postures and motions. Therefore, to support real-time vital data gathering in WBANs, a scheme for mitigating such link blockings is essential. This paper proposes a cooperative scheme for ensuring reliable data transmission in a WBAN. For each sensor node on a human body, the proposed scheme autonomously assigns a sensor node as a cooperator out of other sensor nodes and the cooperator retransmits packets from the sensor node for a coordinator instead of the sensor node when the direct link between them is blocked. After presenting the cooperator selection algorithm, using the Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) data obtained from the experiment in an anechoic chamber, the paper evaluates the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of average and worst outage rates.