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To Hop or Not to Hop: Network Architecture for Body Sensor Networks

As Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) advance to fulfill the promise of continuous, non-intrusive, remote monitoring of patients, it is important that we achieve efficient communication between energy constrained on-body sensors. An important design choice which has significant impact on achieving this goal is the network architecture. Star architecture has been the natural choice for BSNs due to the short distances between the nodes. In this paper, we revisit this choice by quantitatively studying architecture choices using data from experiments conducted by deploying nodes operating at the 2.4 GHz band on actual human volunteers. We compare the star and multihop architectures to highlight their respective performance characteristics. In particular, we use our data to construct multihop networks with routes that maximize end-to-end Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and routes that minimize the average number of retransmissions. Since BSNs span an entire spectrum of applications, each with its unique constraints and requirements, there is no solution that is optimal for all applications. Instead, we show the performance across a variety of metrics and the trade-offs that are achievable. We see that a multihop network minimizing retransmissions has several advantages including having better network lifetime as well as the lowest delay and energy consumption.