Incremental Relay Based Cooperative Communication in Wireless Body Area Networks

Energy efficient and reliable communication is extremely crucial in most of the applications of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). Communication between sensor nodes is the major energy guzzler that limits the network lifetime and hence, disrupt WBAN's operation. Moreover, unreliability in wireless communication caused by the channel impairments, such as shadowing and fading, further exacerbate the situation. This paper presents a new three-stage cooperative relaying scheme which proves to be energy efficient and reliable for WBANs. Analytical expressions for the Energy Efficiency (EE) and Packet Error Rate (PER) are also derived in this study.