2013 IEEE Symposium on Computers & Informatics
Performance investigation of using Direct transmission
and Opportunistic routing in Wireless Body Area
Networks
Umer Fiaz Abbasi, Azlan Awang, Nor Hisham Hamid
Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department,
Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Bandar Seri Iskandar,
31750 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia
Email: rajaumerabbasi@gmail.com, {azlanawang, hishmid}@petronas.com.my
Abstract—Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are gaining
significant attention because they can be very essential for the
daily life applications in hospitals, schools, sports centers and
gaming centers. In WBANs, reliability is a major factor that
affects the system performance. Interference and inefficient
routing can make a WBAN unreliable. However, an
opportunistic routing technique can help to overcome the
reliability problem. Conversely, the broadcast flooding uses all
the available relays resulting in duplicate packets, longer delays
and inefficient use of the network resources. We investigate by
using the opportunistic routing with lognormal path loss model
and IEEE 802.15.6 CM 3A. End-to-end (ETE) delay, network
lifetime, packet delivery ratio and energy used per data packet
are used as the performance metrics. The opportunistic routing
improves the reliability of WBAN by 10% as compared to direct
transmission.
Keywords—Wireless Body Area Network; Opportunistic
routing; Relay selection; Reliability
I. INTRODUCTION
WBANs are a sub-category of Wireless Sensor Networks
(WSNs). WBANs are different from WSNs because of limited
energy resources, less number of nodes, extremely low power
transmission to minimize interference and health effects,
human body shadowing, no redundant nodes and
heterogeneous nature [1]. A typical WBAN consists of a
wireless network of sensor nodes that reside inside, on or off
the body. WBANs have many applications that are usually
related to medical, military, sports and human-interface games.
A non-reliable WBAN can bring severe effects to a patient
under observation, and in the worst case can be fatal. A WBAN
should have a long network lifetime, since it is undesirable to
change the sensors or charge the sensors that reside on or inside
a person’s body. Low battery levels of sensors can negatively
affect the sensor performance. Energy harvesting techniques
can be used as an advanced way of energy conservation to
increase the network lifetime [2].
978-1-4799-0210-1/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE
In WBANs, a star-mesh hybrid topology might be
considered to reduce the chance of single point of failure as it
is for a star network [2]. In WBANs, the special case of front-
back communication is not possible without a relay node due to
the human body shadowing effects [3]. An increase in the
transmit power will be required to overcome the front-back
communication issue but this is not the appropriate solution for
WBANs. The transmit power cannot exceed the limits
respective to the allowed Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) and
this must be taken into account while designing a WBAN [4].
Increasing the transmit power will also increase energy
consumption which is undesirable for a system that requires
energy efficiency. This may also cause an increase in
interference to the neighboring nodes. In [5], the authors
describe that it is always essential to use relay nodes for multi-
hop transmission but it is not feasible to add many nodes into
the network in the case of WBANs because it will decrease the
comfort of the patient.
In opportunistic routing, any sensor node that overhears the
source node transmission can help by forwarding the source
data packets towards the sink [6]. It exploits the broadcast
nature of wireless communication and the next hop is not
known initially. Opportunistic routing can be used for the
purpose of increasing the network lifetime and the system
performance in terms of packet delivery ratio. A relay can be
any sensor node in a network that can help the source node by
forwarding its data. The data transmission can take multiple
hops and the selection of the relays for a communication can be
done on the basis of a criteria.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In
Section II, we explain the related works and opportunistic
routing with a relay selection mechanism for WBANs. In
section III, we discuss the simulation model, performance
metrics, energy consumption calculations and the results.
Finally, we conclude in Section IV.
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 2013 IEEE Symposium on Computers & Informatics
II. OPPORTUNISTIC ROUTING FOR WBANS
In WBANs, the number of deployed nodes on the human
body is a scarce quantity as compared to WSNs which consist
of densely deployed sensor nodes. Therefore, the number of
nodes selected as relays for the opportunistic routing in a
WBAN should also be a small quantity and the use of relays
must be optimized. In [7, 8], the authors explain that using an
optimal relay is equivalent in performance to the use of all
potential relays. This motivates the use of a relay selection
mechanism for the opportunistic routing instead of using all the
relays that might be available.
A. Related Works
The relay selection helps to avoid having multiple copies of
the data within the network and is conducive for energy
efficiency as it allows the use of some, instead of all the
available relays. In [9], they analyze the outage performance of
different transmission schemes that could be implemented in
WBANs. For example, there are three types of nodes in a
network, i.e., the source, intermediate and sink nodes. The
following types of communication can take place between the
source and the sink in this scenario [10]: (i) Direct transmission
from source to sink; (ii) Transmission via intermediate node
that can be Amplify-and-Forward (AF), Decode-and-Forward
(DF) or Compress-and-Forward (CF).
Direct transmission can be used when the channel
conditions between the source and the sink are very good, and
therefore, the use of relay is not necessary. For a large distance
separation or when the path loss between the source and the
destination nodes is higher than a threshold, relaying should be
used. There are two relay coordination modes: reactive mode
and the proactive mode [7]. In the former, all the relays that
successfully receive the source packets take part in the relaying
mechanism. Whereas, in the latter, particular (opportunistic)
relays are selected for forwarding the data.
There are various types of relay selection mechanisms
including fixed, selective and incremental relaying. For Fixed
Relaying, the relays are directly allowed to perform either AF
or DF mechanism on the received message. However, as an
adaptive relaying strategy, selective relaying depends upon the
channel quality between the source and the relay nodes. When
there is good channel quality it uses the fixed relaying,
otherwise it stops relaying. If the nodes are not aware of the
channel conditions, selective relaying cannot be directly used
[11]. In comparison, the incremental relaying uses both the
fixed relaying and the selective relaying along with a limited
feedback from the destination. It stops relaying when the
source-relay channel quality is not good. It is an efficient
technique and saves the channel resources by using direct
transmission only when it is necessary [12]. The outage
behavior of these relaying schemes is described in detail by
authors in [11].
In [13], the authors have proposed a reliable WBAN model
in which the focus is on throughput. A drawback of this model
61
is that all the relays participate in the data transmission which
results in duplicate packets within the network. The use of all
the available relays is also inefficient use of the network’s
resources.
B. Opportunistic routing with Relay selection
An opportunistic routing technique using multiple hops can
help to conserve energy and increase the network lifetime. The
respective relay nodes forward the source node’s data towards
the sink node. By adopting optimum routing paths, the power
consumption load can be divided among multiple sensor nodes
leading towards an improvement in the network lifetime.
The timer based approach is a simple relay selection
mechanism. In this approach, the source broadcasts a request
message and several nodes contend. The first relay that
responds is selected as the next hop node. After being selected,
the relay broadcasts a message notifying all the nodes about its
selection. After the data transmission, relay selection
mechanism is processed again. The authors in [14] use a
shortest distance algorithm for relay selection in opportunistic
routing. However, geographical information is not known to
the nodes in our work and we are not focusing on inter-node
distances.
III. SIMULATION WORK
A. Simulation model
According to [15], various types of propagation channels
can exist in WBANs. However, for our work we are focusing
on on-body and off-body communication. For on-body,
transceiver antennas are located very near to the body and there
is a strong influence of body on the propagation channel.
Whereas, for off-body, the communication exists between
body-worn devices and a remote location and the propagation
channel is influenced by body only on one side of radio link.
Different channel characteristics and PHY layer requirements
are necessary for in-body and body-body communications that
may bring many complications. The future considerations of
our work will include the in-body and the body-body
communications. Even though the communication in WBANs
is small distance, there is a great deal of fading. This fading
occurs mainly due to the human body shadowing and
environmental interference. For this initial work, we firstly use
a commonly used path loss model with log-normal shadowing
called log-normal propagation model [16]. The mathematical
description is given as
ௗ
ܲ‫ܮ‬ሺ݀ሻ ൌ ܲ‫ܮ‬ሺ݀଴ ሻ ൅ ͳͲ݈݊‫݃݋‬ଵ଴ ቀ ቁ ൅  ܺఙ . (1)
ௗబ
In (1), PL(d) is the path loss at transmitter-receiver distance
d, PL(d0) is the path loss at reference distance d0, n is the path
loss exponent, Xı is the zero-mean Gaussian distributed
random variable and ı is the standard deviation of X. Then we
use a propagation model for on-body communications in
 2013 IEEE Symposium on Computers & Informatics

WBANs defined by IEEE 802.15.6 Channel Model (CM) packet as the average energy used per unique data packet that is
document [17]. received at the sink.
ܲ‫ܮ‬ሺ݀ሻ ൌ ܽǤ ݈‫݃݋‬ଵ଴ ሺ݀ሻ ൅ ܾ ൅ ܰఙ . (2)

In (2), PL(d) is the path loss at transmitter-receiver distance

d, a and b are the constants which depend on the considered
environment and N is the zero-mean Gaussian distributed
random variable with ıN standard deviation.
We choose the physical layer parameters according to the
narrowband radio characteristics proposed by IEEE 802.15
Task Group 6 [18]. The simulation parameters are defined in
Table I. Our work uses T-MAC protocol which utilizes
Request-To-Send (RTS)/Clear-To-Send (CTS) exchange
mechanism to avoid collisions [19]. We assume our nodes to
be static.
This simulation model resembles the placement of sensor
nodes on a human body. In our simulation setup, we place ten
sensor nodes in the WBAN and their positioning details are Figure 1. Network configuration.
shown in Fig. 1. The network sink is placed near to the body.
Due to the interference effects and human-body shadowing TABLE I. SIMULATION PARAMETERS
many packets may get lost or received below sensitivity at the
sink. We can use the broadcast flooding where the node Parameter Value
broadcasts its packets and all the other sensor nodes receive Data Rate (kbps) 250
and forward them towards the sink. By this way, the packets
may be successfully received at the sink but there will be Modulation Type DBPSK
multiple duplicate packets flowing in the network causing Transmission Power, PDirect
-10
extra-listening and extra-processing at the receiver. This will be (dBm)
an inefficient use of the resources and may also increase the Transmission Power, POpportunistic
-15
delays in the network. We use an opportunistic routing with a (dBm)
relay selection mechanism. The source node broadcasts a RTS Sensitivity (dBm) -91
packet and all the nodes within its transmission range receive Reference distance d0 (mm) 1
this packet. The first node according to the next time slot sends
Path loss PL(d0) (dBm)
back the CTS packet in response to the RTS packet from the 69
source node and is selected by the network as the relay. This
Path loss exponent (n) 4
CTS packet is a broadcast packet and it notifies all the other
nodes that this node will act as a relay. After this relay Standard deviation of X (ı) 3.8
selection, the data transmission starts. The data packets from
a (dB) 6.6
the source node are sent towards the sink via the relay. In
response to each data packet an acknowledgement (ACK) b (dB) 61
packet from the sink node is sent towards the source node via
Standard deviation of N (ı) 3.8
the relay.
Number of sensor nodes 10
B. Performance metrics
We define reliability as the packet delivery ratio which is Size of RTS/CTS packet (bytes) 13
the ratio of total number of data packets received at the sink to Payload size (bytes) 1,20,40,60,80,100
the total number of data packets transmitted by the source
node. The ETE delay is defined as the difference in time when Packet rate (packets per sec) 1
a packet is received at the sink and when it was sent by the Slot length (msec) 10
source node.
Contention window size 10
The network lifetime is the time by which the first node in a
Simulation field (mm) 2000x2000
network has consumed all its energy [20]. This is important
because a single node failure can interrupt the services Simulation time (sec) 100
provided by a network. We define the energy used per data
Simulation runs 20

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 2013 IEEE Symposium on Computers & Informatics

C. Energy consumption calculations
We assume that the idle listening radio state consumes the
same amount of energy as the receiving (RX) radio state.
However, the energy consumption for the RX radio state is
higher than the transmission (TX) radio state, according to the
narrowband radio proposed by IEEE 802.15 Task Group 6
documents [18]. We calculate the energy for the TX radio state
at an instance by multiplying the total packet TX time with the
respective power consumption rate, according to Table II. The
packet TX time is calculated by taking a ratio of the packet size
to the data rate. Since we are not considering any sleep states,
for the rest of the fraction of a second, the radio is either in RX
radio state or the idle listening radio state, for which the energy
is calculated using the same way as for the TX radio state.
TABLE II. ENERGY CONSUMPTION CALCULATIONS
Power
TX Power (dBm) Radio State Consumption Rate
(mW)
TX 3.0
Fig. 3 depicts the ETE delay versus payload size. The ETE
delay for the opportunistic routing is less than the direct
transmission. This is because the node 10 in direct transmission
keeps the channel busy while waiting for a response from the
sink, which increases the ETE delay. In contrast, it broadcasts
in opportunistic routing and uses the relay which sends the first
response, due to which the ETE delay is less as compared to
direct transmission. The IEEE 802.15.6 CM 3A has lesser ETE
delay than the log normal path loss model. As we keep on
increasing the payload size, the ETE delay increases. This is
due to the fact that the channel access delay is higher for large
payload size. The nodes have to transmit large sized packets
keeping the channel busy which increases the ETE delay. The
ETE delay values for all the cases lie within the range of
tolerable values according to the requirements of wireless
medical applications [21].
7
x 10
10
Opportunistic Routing with Log Normal Path loss model
Opportunistic Routing with IEEE 802.15.6 CM 3A
9 Direct transmission

-10 RX 3.1

Network Lifetime (s)

8
Idle listening 3.1

TX 2.93 7

-15 RX 3.1
6
Idle listening 3.1

D. Simulation Results
We first move the “Node 10” to a different position in such 4
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
a way that there may be some packet loss at the sink for direct Payload size (bytes)
transmission. We do this to realize the WBAN, where the
human body shadowing and the environmental interference Figure 2. Network lifetime versus Payload size.
greatly affect the direct transmission. We also want to analyze
the results of opportunistic routing, when the direct
transmission is not sufficient for successful data transmission. 100
Opportunistic Routing with Log Normal Path loss model
We present the results for each of the performance metrics 98 Opportunistic Routing with IEEE 802.15.6 CM 3A
with respect to payload size. Fig. 2 shows the network lifetime 96
Direct transmission

as a function of payload size. It can be seen that the network

lifetime curve is higher in the case of the opportunistic routing 94

in comparison to the direct transmission. This is due to the fact

ETE delay (ms)

92
that the nodes were involved in multi-hop communication in
90
the opportunistic routing and hence, used less TX power to
send the data to next hop, according to the inverse-square 88
relation between power and distance. In case of opportunistic 86
routing, the curve with log normal path loss model is slightly
higher than the curve with IEEE 802.15.6 CM 3A. However, 84

with increasing payload size the network lifetime also increases 82

because the TX time is higher for large packets. Due to this
high TX time, the nodes remain in TX radio state for a longer 80
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
time that consumes less power than the RX radio state. Payload size (bytes)

Figure 3. ETE delay versus Payload size.

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 2013 IEEE Symposium on Computers & Informatics

-4
x 10
6.5
Fig. 4 describes the packet delivery ratio against payload Opportunistic Routing with Log Normal Path loss model

size. The packet delivery ratio for direct transmission is 10% 6

Opportunistic Routing with IEEE 802.15.6 CM 3A
Direct transmission
less than opportunistic routing and it shows that there are

Energy used per data packet (J)

packet losses. These packet losses are mainly due to the fact 5.5
that in direct transmission if the sink is out or even at the edge
of the transmission range of a sensor node, either packets will 5
not be received or will be received below sensitivity. These
range issues along with the environmental interference effects 4.5
and the human-body shadowing cause packet losses. The
packet delivery ratio decreases with increasing payload size 4
because for a larger packet the wireless channel is occupied for
a longer time by a node and the other nodes will keep on going 3.5
in to back off slots to compete to access the channel increasing
the probability of channel access failure. However, the packet 3
delivery ratio for the IEEE 802.15.6 CM 3A is the highest for 0 20 40 60 80 100 120
Payload size (bytes)
payload size less than 40 bytes. At 40 bytes, it is same for both
the channel models applied for opportunistic routing. And for
payload size more than 40 bytes, it is less for IEEE 802.15.6 Figure 5. Energy used per data packet versus Payload size.
CM 3A than the log normal path loss model. We suggest this
behaviour may be due to the body shadowing. But this requires At 40 bytes, it is same for both the channel models applied for
further investigation by varying other aspects of the network opportunistic routing. And for payload size more than 40 bytes,
and analysing the respective results. it is higher for IEEE 802.15.6 CM 3A than the log normal path
loss model. This behaviour is due to the finding that the
Fig. 5 shows the energy used per data packet versus number of received packets for IEEE 802.15.6 CM 3A
payload size. It can be seen that the energy used per data packet decrease drastically with increasing payload size.
is lower for the opportunistic routing than the direct
transmission. This is because of the energy conservation due to IV. CONCLUSION
the low power multi-hop transmission in opportunistic routing.
In this work, a simple opportunistic routing technique with
As we increase the payload size, the energy used per data
two different path loss models has been investigated with
packet also increases. This is due to the fact that the large
respect to the performance metrics. The respective results have
payload size increases the probability of channel access failure,
been analyzed and the aim was to improve the reliability of the
in turn decreasing the number of packets received at the sink.
WBAN. The simulation results show that by using
This decrease enhances the energy used per data packet.
opportunistic routing the packet delivery ratio, the energy used
However, the energy used per data packet for the IEEE
per data packet, ETE delay and the network lifetime are
802.15.6 CM 3A is lowest for payload size less than 40 bytes.
improved. The results depict that the reliability of WBAN has
been improved up to 10% by using opportunistic routing.
However, the IEEE 802.15.6 CM 3A behaves differently than
Opportunistic Routing with Log Normal Path loss model
Opportunistic Routing with IEEE 802.15.6 CM 3A
the log normal path loss model. Further investigation is
1.1
Direct transmission required to study the behaviour of different propagation models
in WBANs.
1
Packet Delivery Ratio

As part of our future work, we plan to optimize the relay

0.9
selection mechanism and also study the effects of varying node
density. In-body and body-body propagation channels along
0.8
with a multi-WBAN topology may also be considered for
further research work in WBANs.
0.7
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
0.6
This research work was supported by Universiti Teknologi
PETRONAS, Perak, Malaysia.
0.5
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
Payload size (bytes)

Figure 4. Packet Delivery Ratio versus Payload size.

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 2013 IEEE Symposium on Computers & Informatics
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