ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the requirements and mechanisms for efficient and reliable data delivery in Wireless body area networks (WBANs). It focuses on data delivery to a gateway node within a WBAN and discusses data delivery to a central station in a heterogeneous ambient network. Health- and well-being–monitoring applications may use specific network organizations including WBANs. WBANs require proper network adaptation mechanisms in order to achieve acceptable data delivery performance. The objective of WBAN adaptation is to follow and adapt to the changes in the network connectivity in order to continuously satisfy the data delivery requirements and optimize the power consumption. Tree structures are commonly used for data routing in wireless sensor networks. Health-monitoring applications expect certain performance of WBAN data delivery. Depending on the nature of the biological signals being sensed and the application scenario, several data scenarios can be distinguished in WBAN applications as, namely, status information, events, and continuous waveform signals.
