Abstract
Significant research efforts are being devoted to Body Area Networks (BAN) due to their potential for revolutionizing healthcare practices. Energy-efficiency and communication reliability are critically important for these networks. In an experimental study with three different mote platforms, we show that changes in human body shadowing as well as those in the relative distance and orientation of nodes caused by the common human body movements can result in significant fluctuations in the received signal strength within a BAN. Furthermore, regular movements, such as walking, typically manifest in approximately periodic variations in signal strength. We present an algorithm that predicts the signal strength peaks and evaluate it on real-world data. We present the design of an opportunistic MAC protocol, named BANMAC, that takes advantage of the periodic fluctuations of the signal strength to achieve high reliability even with low transmission power.
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Keywords
- Wireless Sensor Network
- Receive Signal Strength Indicator
- Body Area Network
- Receive Signal Strength Indicator Measurement
- Embed Network Sensor System
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Prabh, K.S., Hauer, JH. (2011). Opportunistic Packet Scheduling in Body Area Networks. In: Marrón, P.J., Whitehouse, K. (eds) Wireless Sensor Networks. EWSN 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6567. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19186-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19186-2_8
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