On the packet error rate of correlated shadowing links in Body-Area Networks

Body Area Networks (BAN) offer amazing perspectives to instrument and support humans in many aspects of their lives. In this paper, we consider on-body BAN nodes transmitting information towards a common sink, in a star topology. While this setup is usual in wireless networks, the high instability of the BAN radio channel and the proximity of the body make classical communication protocols inefficient. These networks are further constrained by the low transmission power required for both battery life and health concerns. Opportunistic cooperation techniques are of great interest in such environment to ensure reliable communications. In previous works, we studied simple opportunistic relaying schemes under independent BAN links, using a packet error outage criterion. In this paper, we introduce a more realistic case where shadowing variations around the body are now assumed strongly correlated. Generally speaking, there is a lack of definitive measurements and models for the shadowing correlation in multi-hop networks, while it can play a crucial role at the higher layers. Based on the measurement and simulation results of the French BANET project, we use the BAN context as an illustrative example to exhibit how shadowing correlations have a strong impact on relaying approaches performance.