  The rapid advances in sensors and ultra-low power wireless communication has
enabled a new generation of wireless sensor networks: Wireless Body Area
Networks (WBAN). To the best of our knowledge the current paper is the first to
address broadcast in WBAN. We first analyze several broadcast strategies
inspired from the area of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN). The proposed
strategies are evaluated via the OMNET++ simulator that we enriched with
realistic human body mobility models and channel models issued from the recent
research on biomedical and health informatics. Contrary to the common
expectation, our results show that existing research in DTN cannot be
transposed without significant modifications in WBANs area. That is, existing
broadcast strategies for DTNs do not perform well with human body mobility.
However, our extensive simulations give valuable insights and directions for
designing efficient broadcast in WBAN. Furthermore, we propose a novel
broadcast strategy that outperforms the existing ones in terms of end-to-end
delay, network coverage and energy consumption. Additionally, we performed
investigations of independent interest related to the ability of all the
studied strategies to ensure the total order delivery property when stressed
with various packet rates. These investigations open new and challenging
research directions.
