Multi-Hop WBAN Construction for Healthcare IoT Systems

It is expected that the Internet of Things (IoT) applications for medical services can be one of the most remarkable solution for taking care of aging population which is in the rapid growth. IoT consists of communications and sensors to accomplish purpose. In the diverse kinds of networks, wireless body area network (WBAN) is a highly suitable communication tool for the medical IoT devices. There are many researches about WBAN and sensor network, which are mainly focused on energy efficiency. However, in this paper, we discuss more practical issues for implementation of WBAN to healthcare service. Therefore, we propose a multi-hop WBAN construction scheme that is consists of 4 operations, the clustered topology setup, mobility support, and transmission efficiency enhancement. As an auxiliary benefit, the proposed scheme achieves an energy efficient feature by reducing the number of total control messages. Extensive simulation shows that the proposed scheme remarkably improves the performance of WBAN.