Habitat monitoring: application driver for wireless communications technology
SIGCOMM LA '01 Workshop on Data communication in Latin America and the Caribbean
A high-throughput path metric for multi-hop wireless routing
Proceedings of the 9th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Link-level measurements from an 802.11b mesh network
Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Temporal properties of low power wireless links: modeling and implications on multi-hop routing
Proceedings of the 6th ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing
Investigating network architectures for body sensor networks
Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGMOBILE international workshop on Systems and networking support for healthcare and assisted living environments
Improving Reliability in Multi-hop Body Sensor Networks
SENSORCOMM '08 Proceedings of the 2008 Second International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications
On the performance of Bluetooth and IEEE 802.15.4 radios in a body area network
BodyNets '08 Proceedings of the ICST 3rd international conference on Body area networks
A Low-delay Protocol for Multihop Wireless Body Area Networks
MOBIQUITOUS '07 Proceedings of the 2007 Fourth Annual International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking&Services (MobiQuitous)
To hop or not to hop: network architecture for body sensor networks
SECON'09 Proceedings of the 6th Annual IEEE communications society conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks
A comparative study of wireless communication network configurations for medical applications
IEEE Wireless Communications
Building a real-world body area sensor network system
Proceedings of the Second Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware
Understanding Link Behavior of Non-intrusive Wireless Body Sensor Networks
Wireless Personal Communications: An International Journal
FLIGHT: clock calibration using fluorescent lighting
Proceedings of the 18th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Authentication of lossy data in body-sensor networks for cloud-based healthcare monitoring
Future Generation Computer Systems
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Body Area Networks (BANs) can perform the task of continuous, remote monitoring of a patient's physiological signals in diverse environments. Apart from providing healthcare professionals with extensive logs of a patient's physiological history, BANs can be used to identify and react to emergency situations. We identify three important factors that afflict wireless communication in BANs: impermeability of the human body to radio waves at frequencies commonly used in BANs, efficient operation in mobile and time-varying environments, and mission-critical requirements for quick response to emergencies. An understanding of the link layer behavior of wireless sensor nodes placed on the body is crucial to address these and other challenges such as reducing energy consumption and increasing network lifetime. In this paper, we investigate link layer behavior by placing nodes on the body and directly measuring metrics of interest to engineers such as packet delivery ratio (PDR) and RSSI. Emulating a possible real-life BAN operating at the 2.4 GHz band with 12 sensor nodes, we collect over 80 hours of data from 14 volunteers in $3$ different environments that BANs are expected to operate in. We analyze the data to reveal several link layer characteristics to provide insight and guidelines for the designing of BANs. We also evaluate the performance of common routing metrics on our data. Our analysis helps us make the following conclusions. Link PDR is highly affected by the environment and not significantly by the volunteer for the experiment. Routing between nodes on the same side of the body is preferred to routing between nodes on the opposite sides. For links with the same source, failure of packet transmission to a certain node, in some cases, implies the increased probability of reception for other nodes. Most errors occur in bursts of length 1, but a small fraction occur in longer periods ($40$ packets or more).