MODELING ON BODY DELAY TOLERANT NETWORK SINK LOCALITY OF WIRELESS BODY AREA NETWORKS FOR DIFFERENT BODY POSTURES

Abstract

Due to the recent advancements in the field of wireless communication and Wireless Sensor Networks, the Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) have become a major area of concern for researchers. In military operations, patient monitoring, sports field, among others wireless body area network is used for real time smart monitoring and smart sensing for smart eHealth operations. In these wireless body area networks, disconnections between the body sensors occur quite often and sometimes of significant duration due to postural mobility nature of the human. This consequently affects the efficiency of entire network hence the need for Delay Tolerant Network (DTN). The DTN minimizes delays and adapts itself to cope with long delays if they occur. One of the vital mechanisms that can be employed to enhance the efficiency of the network is to determine the optimal postural locality of the sink node. Human body shows postural mobility due to which disconnection occurs, wireless body area network model has been created for illustrating and capturing on-body topology disconnections due human postural mobility. In this paper the Omnet++ simulation tool was used to simulate and determine the postural locality of a sink node of a human body. From simulation experiments, it was determined that the waist position of the coordinator outperforms other positions based on average delay and energy consumption. By determining the best postural locality of the sink node, among other factors, the performance and lifetime of the WBAN can be greatly improved.