Network coding for non-invasive Wireless Body Area Networks

During recent years Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have been experienced continuous developments by researchers both in academia as well as industry due to its capabilities and various promising applications, for instance, in the areas of healthcare, sports, military, etc. One of the crucial requirements in designing a WBAN, especially, for the healthcare applications is network reliability since it is related to life in patients. However, due to the close proximity of the network to the human body, electromagnetic waves affect the human body should be extremely low. Thus, a WBAN requires a low transmission power meaning that a sensor node does not transmit its data directly to a monitoring device or a gateway but the data are forwarded by a relay node. In this study, we apply the assistance of a relay combining with network coding design to improve network reliability of a WBAN at very low computational and hardware cost. An Unequally Error Protection (UEP) concept is cooperated with network coding at the relay for different classes of data packets corresponding to WBAN applications.