Behavior-aware probabilistic routing for wireless body area sensor networks

Recent advances in wireless communication and electronic manufacture have enabled a variety of sensors to be used for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), which can provide real-time body monitoring and feedback for enabling patient diagnostics procedure, rehabilitation, sports training and interactive performance. However, existing single-hop wireless communication scheme faces several major challenges: rapid growth of channel conflicts as more sensors added, impermeability of human body to radio waves and highly dynamic network topology due to human movements. In this paper, a prototype of multi-hop WBAN has been built to quantify the channel conflict and to characterise the network connectivity during human motions. A probability based routing protocol fusing inertial sensor data and history link quality is then developed, which aims at capturing the high spatio-temporal change of network topology on the selection of a reliable relay node in WBAN routing. The performance of the protocol is experimentally evaluated on our prototype system. Compared with a number of existing routings, the proposed scheme is more splendid in terms of average delivery ratio, number of hops and end-to-end delay.