Reliable and energy efficient protocols for wireless body area networks

This work wants to develop and analyze protocols to provide medium access in wireless networks on the human body, known as WBANs. Because of their application domain, the protocols must be reliable and energy efficient. To this extent, a number of metrics like channel utilization and energy efficiency are defined. First an overview is given of the field of WBAN research. The demographical motivation is described, together with multiple application domains. Afterwards the research in WBANs is focused on, showing a large interest in new radio chip development and WBAN applications. Two basic concepts, TDMA and cross layering are explained, followed by a study of work related to medium access in WBANs. After the overview, the first part presents TDMA protocols for multi-hop WBANs: the WASP and CICADA protocols. Both algorithms control medium access by means of a distributed slot scheduling algorithm. The latter is further analyzed by means of a simulation study, based on a number of static and mobile WBAN specific scenarios. Some extensions are further analyzed, to increase reliability and decrease energy consumption. A secure variant of the CICADA protocol and an implementation are described, demonstrating feasibility of the proposed algorithms. Based on the observations of multi-hop WBANs, the impact of topology on the protocol performance and more specifically energy efficiency is studied. It is shown that classical single hop and multi-hop topologies generate sub-optimal energy efficiency, because of the appearance of hot spots near the sink. To overcome this, a cooperative approach is proposed and analyzed. It is shown that this improve energy efficiency drastically. The second part presents algorithms for highly mobile WBANs, the LIMB protocols. First the mobile WBANs are analyzed and a divide-and-conquer approach is introduced. The more static nodes will form a backbone network and will support the mobile nodes. Three variants are proposed and analyzed with a simulation study, with scenarios similar to those of the first part. Because of high sensitivity to channel quality, a number of extensions are proposed and studied. The resulting protocols show high channel utilization under the mobile scenarios, while keeping the consumed energy limited. This work is then concluded and some topics for future work are suggested.

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