A novel reliability scheme employing multiple sink nodes for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) offer tremendous benefits for remote health monitoring and real-time patient care. However, the success of such a system would primarily depend on the reliability of the data transmitted by the WBAN. Two aspects of data reliability need to be considered, namely, data accuracy and data freshness (or, recentness of data). Assuming that the sophistication of the sensors addresses the problem of data accuracy, the freshness of such data becomes crucial. The focus of this work is to ensure reduced delay of communication within the WBAN, thereby reducing the overall network delay, which in turn maintains data freshness at the end point. This paper presents a novel scheme that focuses on reducing packet losses, and hence, the associated delay, to maintain data transmitted by the WBAN as fresh as possible. The paper presents a scheme using multiple sink nodes to achieve the objective. The proposed scheme is validated through simulation analyses.