Experimental Characterisation of Data Aggregation in BANs with a Walking Subject

This paper deals with the implementation of a Wireless Body Area Network, where sensor devices, are deployed on a body and report the measured data to a final receiver. A novel Medium Access Control protocol, inspired by those defined by the IEEE 802.15.4 and 802.15.6 standards, is pre- sented and a data aggregation strategy is proposed to reduce packets losses and energy consumption. The latter oppor- tunistically exploits the body movements performed when the human subject is walking: transmissions are inhibited when no connectivity between transmitter and receiver is present and aggregated data is transmitted when visibility is gained. Results are achieved through experimental mea- surements made on the field, by implementing the proposed solution on the Texas Instruments CC2530 platform. Re- sults show the benefit of applying such a data aggregation strategy. This work has been performed in the framework of the FP7 Integrated Project, WiserBAN (Smart miniature low-power wireless microsystem for Body Area Networks).