Overcoming body obstruction for robust data communication in wireless body sensor networks by placing relay nodes

The primary requirement for a wireless body sensor networks (WBSN) is to collect data with a high sampling rate from on-body wireless sensors, and yet transmit the data with very low power radio. The problem is that the body can easily obstruct the transmission of low-power radio signals, thereby significantly reducing the success rate of data communication from the sensor nodes to the sinks. In this paper, we propose a novel relay node placement scheme for preserving network connectivity, and therefore enhance the success rate of data communication. We empirically evaluate our approach using a wearable sensor platform to show the improvements in packet success rates. Our experiments show that in most cases the average improvement can reach 34.74 %.