A Cross-Layer Approach for Wireless Body Area Networks.

Research in wireless body area network (WBAN) has gained interest and has become an emerging health service application because of the potential for its use in continuous monitoring of human well-being. The natural human body movements and environmental interference impose difficulties on WBAN performance, such as operational lifetime and data delivery reliability. This work proposes a cross-layer approach, called CL, based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard to guarantee quality of service in terms of packet delivery and network lifetime. The proposed protocol is compared to the original standard and results suggest that CL outperforms when interference is the cause of packet delivery failures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]