Channels Characteristics for On-Body Mica 2 Dot Wireless Sensor Networks

Wearable computing has long been interested by numerous research groups. Biomedical applications in Sensor Networks also attract many researchers’ focuses, especially in the real-time health status monitoring field. However, the inconvenience of interconnecting sensors through wires not only induces high maintenance cost also limits freedom of human action. By attaching various types of bio-sensors to wireless sensor nodes, the unnatural wire constraints have been removed. The sampled data are transmitted through wireless interface and the system can response in time according to the different vital signs. Unlike wire connections, wireless connections are unstable and vulnerable to environments. It is our goal to study how human body affects wireless links qualities; we attached sensor nodes onto different parts of human body, and monitored the packet reception rate to learn how channels behave. We expect these experimental results can be used to assist constructing reliable and efficient wireless connections between on-body sensor nodes for related biomedical researches. Index Terms – Sensor Networks, Wearable Computing.