Lifetime Enhancement and Reliability in Wireless Body Area Network

1. Introduction

Wireless technology has advanced to be become a vital part of our lives starting from mobile communication to health care departments. Recently, there has been growing interest from system inventors application and researchers on a newly designed type of network architecture usually known as body sensor networks (BSNs) or body area networks (BANs), one made feasible by novel advances on ultra-low-power, lightweight, small-size and intelligent observing wearable sensors. In BANs, sensors are used to constantly monitor human’s functional activities and movements, such as health position and movement pattern. A wireless healthcare application offers and brings many benefits and challenges to the healthcare sector. These benefits provide a convenient-environment that can monitor the daily lives and medical situations of patients at any time, anywhere and without limitations. The Figure 1 shows how WBAN provides a wireless connection between these devices and a Personal digital assistant (PDA) or a smartphone, which is responsible for the connection with other networks. For example, the obtained data can be forwarded to a hospital server.

Figure 1.

Data transmission in WBSN