An efficient transmission approach for information-centric based wireless body area networks

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are the promising network infrastructure to achieve ubiquitous personal health management services. In WBANs, the biological sensors are attached to the human body to obtain health related information and the communication gateway sends the sensed data to the health data server periodically. The health service providers can use the data to provide specific treatment for each individual according to her personal condition. Despite many advantages, the TCP/IP protocols used by WBANs incur efficiency issue of the data transmission. In TCP/IP, the data and their storage location are coupled, which greatly affects data transmission performance of WBANs. Moreover, additional security layer is required to support data privacy and security in WBANs. In this paper, an Efficient Transmission Approach for Information-Centric based Wireless Body Area Network (ETA-ICWBAN) is proposed. The proposed ETA-ICWBAN classifies the data into different priorities (high, normal, low) and the communication gateway buffers the data in the designated queue. We design a hybrid queue management algorithm to balance the different priority data transmission with various network conditions. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is able to improve the data transmission performance for WBANs.