Reliable data retrieval in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) is critical in the patient monitoring and other medical services. The limitation of energy supply and the mobility of body sensors exacerbate the difficulties of efficient data transmission.
This paper proposed the Information-centric data retrieval in WBAN (named by I-WBAN) to improve the reliability and efficiency, which was featured by: (i) adopting the name-based delivery instead of address-based one; (ii) utilizing duplicate caching contents instead of redundant sensors; (iii) using the receiver-driven chunk-level data transmission instead of the sender-driven one. Simulation results showed I-WBAN achieved considerable improvements in terms of packets loss ratio, transmission delay and energy consumption with respective to the traditional approach such as 6LoWPAN.