A Novel Cooperation-Based Network Coding Scheme for Walking Scenarios in WBANs

In Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), the tradeoff between network throughput and energy efficiency remains a key challenge. Most current transmission schemes try to cope with the challenge from the perspective of general Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which may not take the peculiarities of WBAN channels into account. In this paper, we take advantage of the correlation of on-body channels in walking scenarios to achieve a better trade-off between throughput and energy consumption. We first analyze the characteristics of on-body channels based on realistic channel gain datasets, which are collected by our customized wireless transceivers in walking scenarios. The analytical results confirm the rationale of our newly proposed transmission scheme A3NC, which explores the combination of the Aggregative Allocation (AA) mechanism in MAC layer and the Analog Network Coding (ANC) technique in PHY layer. Both theoretical analyses and simulation results show that the A3NC scheme achieves significant improvement in upload throughput and energy efficiency, compared to the conventional approaches.