  A high degree of reliability for critical data transmission is required in
body sensor networks (BSNs). However, BSNs are usually vulnerable to channel
impairments due to body fading effect and RF interference, which may
potentially cause data transmission to be unreliable. In this paper, an
adaptive and flexible fault-tolerant communication scheme for BSNs, namely
AFTCS, is proposed. AFTCS adopts a channel bandwidth reservation strategy to
provide reliable data transmission when channel impairments occur. In order to
fulfill the reliability requirements of critical sensors, fault-tolerant
priority and queue are employed to adaptively adjust the channel bandwidth
allocation. Simulation results show that AFTCS can alleviate the effect of
channel impairments, while yielding lower packet loss rate and latency for
critical sensors at runtime.
