PBDT: an Energy-Efficient Posture based Data Transmission for Repeated Activities in BAN

Changes in the BAN topology are caused due to the body movement induced by repeated activities like walking, running, twisting, turning and waving arms. In such activities, individual nodes may move relative to each other and along with this, the entire BAN may move its absolute location, which can induce several complexities in the network like re-transmission, collision, overhearing and changing interference. This paper presents a scheme referred as, posture based data transmission (PBDT) with the objective of efficient data transmission. PBDT is based on the occurrence of potential (best) posture over time in repeated activities. In PBDT, each node follows the procedures: (a) recognized the sequence of postures by observing the variation of received signal strength indicator (RSSI) from neighbor nodes over time, (b) finds the best posture from posture sequence for data transmission, (c) maintains a dynamic active/sleep schedule in order to reduce lossy transmission, collision and overhearing. Here, we consider walking as a repeated action over time to check the validity of the proposed mechanism. PBDT is implemented using Castalia simulator and compared with selected MAC protocols. The results are analyzed in respect to the energy consumption and throughput.