Proposal of a hierarchical topology and spatial reuse superframe for enhancing throughput of a cluster-based WBAN

A cluster topology was proposed with the assumption of zero noise to improve the performance of wireless body area networks (WBANs). However, in WBANs, the transmission power should be reduced as low as possible to avoid the effect of electromagnetic waves on the human body and to extend the lifetime of a battery. Therefore, in this work, we consider a bit error rate for a cluster-based WBAN and analyze the performance of the system while the transmission of sensors and cluster headers (CHs) is controlled. Moreover, a hierarchical topology is proposed for the cluster-based WBAN to further improve the throughput of the system; this proposed system is called as the hierarchical cluster WBAN. The hierarchical cluster WBAN is combined with a transmission control scheme, that is, complete control, spatial reuse superframe, to increase the throughput. The proposed system is analyzed and evaluated based on several factors of the system model, such as signal-to-noise ratio, number of clusters, and number of sensors. The calculation result indicates that the proposed hierarchical cluster WBAN outperforms the cluster-based WBAN in all analyzed scenarios. © 2019 ETRI