Quality-of-Service in BAN: PER Reduction and its Trade-Offs

  • Authors:
  • Fabien Massé;Julien Penders

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • BSN '10 Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Body Sensor Networks
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In ambulatory conditions, body area network (BAN) performances are often impaired due to body obstruction or radio interferences from the surrounding environment. Even in these unfavourable conditions, a Quality-of-service (QoS) layer shall ensure that some critical services are met. The wide variability of BAN applications calls for a flexible QoS layer, which can easily be optimized towards certain application-specific requirements. In this paper we propose a flexible QoS layer for BAN addressing the following services: data consistency (Packet Error Rate –PER-), latency, node lifetime and memory. The QoS layer is evaluated in experimental conditions. Its ability to reduce packet loss (improve data consistency) is demonstrated. The trade-offs with other services (latency, energy consumption) are discussed. A PER reduction of 90% is reported, at the cost of an increased latency (350 ms) and energy consumption (7% increase). PER can be reduced to close to 0% for application in which the latency is left unconstrained. The impact of the memory allocated to QoS layer on the performances is characterized.