Experimental Characterization of Data Aggregation in BANs with 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 presented and a data aggregation strategy is proposed to reduce packets losses and energy consumption. The latter opportunistically 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 measurements made on the field, by implementing the proposed solution on the Texas Instruments CC2530 platform. Results 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).