Investigating the impact of body node coordinator position on communication reliability in wireless body area networks

Advances in telecommunications technology and the miniaturization of biomedical sensors have allowed the rapid and widespread adoption of wireless body area networks (WBANs) to provide affordable, innovative, patient-centric e-health solutions to the growing elderly population in developed countries. However, WBANs confront a variety of challenges and have to meet different requirements, such as reliability, quality of service, and energy consumption, required to mainly support medical applications. Due to the limitations of sensor nodes and the wireless channel. improving communication reliability is an essential prerequisite for transmitting the valuable data collected. In this context, the objective of the present research is to study the reliability of communication by investigating the effect of the position of the body coordinator node (BNC). We propose two methods for identifying the best position for this node. One is channel-based (M1) and the other is topology-based (M2). We validated the experimental results with ANOVA (analysis of variance). The results obtained showed that the optimal position of the BNC can depend on several factors, such as gender, morphology, and human activities.