An Energy-Efficient and Cooperative Fault-Tolerant Communication Approach for Wireless Body Area Network

The tremendous advancement in embedded systems, miniaturization, and wireless technology had allowed Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) to have overwhelming applications in e-healthcare, entertainment, sports/games training, etc. WBAN is a special type of wireless sensor network where bio-sensors are attached or embedded to a single human-body designed to connect various bio-sensors and applications, operate autonomously and observe different vital signs of a human body remotely. Despite its enormous benefits and applications, some of the key challenges in designing heterogeneous WBAN is their energy-efficiency, reliability, and fault-tolerance among the installed bio-sensors. Due to the criticality of services related to WBAN applications, it is imperative to have a high degree of reliability and fault-tolerance, especially in the case of health-care monitoring applications where continuous monitoring of patient's vital information is required for diagnosis. However, in health-care applications, interference and body fading occur, which affect the communication among nodes and gateway, which reduces the reliability and fault-tolerance of the network. To address these issues, in this paper, we have proposed an energy-efficient fault-tolerant scheme to improve the reliability of WBANs. The proposed scheme adopted the cooperative communication and network coding strategy to minimize channel impairment and body fading effect and hence reduces the ensued faults, bit error rate, and energy consumption. Based on the proposed scheme, a case study was designed for remote Sepsis monitoring. The system identifies tracking indicators using cooperative communication to reduce hospital re-admissions and mortality rates. The proposed scheme performance is also evaluated via extensive simulations using various metrics. From the results obtained, it is evident that the proposed scheme reduces energy consumption, delay, and bit error rate, thereby increasing the throughput and reliability in WBAN.