Description

In a wireless body area network (WBAN), high data reliability and long operating time are important requirements. The retransmission process of the default Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) mechanism in IEEE 802.15.4 is a suitable method to ensure the data reliability of WBAN communications, where frame loss can occur frequently. However, retransmitting the entire DATA frame is energy inefficient due to the fact that the most of payload data within lost frames are only partially corrupted. Therefore, this paper proposes the automatic segment repeat request scheme for the IEEE 802.15.4-based WBANs. The proposed scheme partitions the data payload into segments when the channel condition is bad, and retransmits only the corrupted segment(s). This reduces the size of the retransmitted frames, which improves frame reception rate and decreases the amount of transmitted traffic, and thus energy consumption. Our experiments using a real IEEE 802.15.4-based WBAN test bed show that the proposed method provides higher transmission reliability and lower power consumption than the default IEEE 802.15.4 ARQ mechanism.