Efficient Health Data Transmission Method in a Wireless Body Area Network for Rural Elderly

The wireless body area network (WBAN) can monitor human physiological information for a long time and alleviate problems such as the imbalance of medical resources distribution and population aging. The complex human media may make data transmission unstable in wireless body area networks. A delay-tolerant WBAN opportunity transmission method based on human data priority was studied. In this method, the historical states between links are recorded by a sliding window. Then, the link stability is measured by a prediction function. At the same time, considering the heterogeneity of the data in the body area network, transmission priority is assigned to different health data. Combined with residual energy, link stability, and distance, the transmission cost of the candidate set is calculated, and the node with the lowest expected transmission cost is selected as the next hop to improve the reliability of data transmission. The experimental results showed that this method includes the characteristics of opportunity routing and WBAN to transmit health data with lower delay and higher efficiency than previous methods.