Supporting mobility in Wireless Body Area Networks: An analysis

In a world with a growing elderly population, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are considered an opportunity to supply healthcare to a growing number of patients requiring continuous medical care. A large number of WBAN sensors, radios, medium access and routing protocols has already been developed and is actively being developed. Together with an increasing number of applications and field trials, this illustrates how promising WBANs are, both to academia and industry. Currently, WBANs are almost always assumed to have a single-hop topology, where all nodes on the body are in range of the central sink device. However, to conserve energy and to limit exposure of the human body to radiation, research indicates the need to support multi-hop topologies. In those small-scale topologies, a small body movement can cause a complete topology reorganization or more general node mobility. This work analyzes three algorithm variants to support these mobile WBANs, with respect to channel utilization and energy efficiency, in both a static and a mobile scenario.