Channel-Aware Gait-Cycle-Based Transmission in Wireless Body Area Networks

The use of the Internet of Things has proven to be an alternative for health monitoring, providing less discomfort to patients and good cost-benefit. To fully exploit the benefits of wireless technologies in e-health, the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) has been created. However, technical and social challenges must be addressed to enable their adoption. Some factors, such as the use of the human body as a propagation media, and human body movements, make WBAN a new paradigm of wireless communication networks. The human body movement and posture affect the wireless channel quality, which may result in poor communication performance. To meet the requirements of WBAN applications, while preserving the energy efficiency, this paper proposes a Channel Aware Gait-cycle-based transmission mechanism (CAG), a mechanism that uses human body movement and channel response correlation to transmit during good channel conditions, ensuring reliability and energy savings. Our proposal was analyzed in the Castalia Simulator and compared against TDMA-based scheduling and the IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA protocol. Simulation results show CAG significantly improves packet delivery ratio and energy efficiency.