Energy‐efficient two‐hop extension protocol for wireless body area networks

Abstract

Recent technological advances in integrated circuits, wireless communications and physiological sensing have allowed ultra-low power, intelligent-monitoring tiny devices to settle around the human body, forming a wireless body area network (WBAN) to collect information for a particular purpose. As these tiny devices are low-weighted and energy-restricted, 'energy efficiency' becomes a key issue. Built in 2012 to facilitate the development of WBAN, the 'IEEE 802.15.6' standard operates with one-hop star and two-hop restricted tree topologies. Its two-hop extension protocol has relaying nodes (working as a microhub), process node joining and schedule two-hop transmissions, thus reducing their lifetime. To reduce the energy consumption and overhead for relaying nodes, the authors introduce a new two-hop extension protocol which lets the generally better resource-equipped hub directly transmit packets to the downlink relayed nodes. Analytical and experimental evaluations show that when advancing 'IEEE 802.15.6' in extending the lifetime of relaying nodes with less energy consumption and overhead, the authors' new protocol also retains its advantages, including longer lifetime for relayed nodes and lower bit error rates.

Channel estimation and transmit power control in wireless body area networks

“…The impact of topology on reliability and energy consumption is examined in [7], in which multi‐hop star networks are shown to maximise reliability at the expense of energy consumption and delay. The performance of the IEEE 802.15.6 two‐hop extension is studied in [8] in terms of packet delivery ratio and reliability. The routing scheme in [9] attempts to maximise the packet delivery ratio while minimising the energy consumption and identifies the benefit of a TPC scheme that adapts to channel conditions.…”

Throughput optimization with fairness consideration for coexisting WBANs

“…access sucess access total (7) where access sucess represents the number of successful access that sensor s n k makes, and access total represents the total number of access attempt that sensor s n k tries. Besides, the value of w n k is closer to 1, the better QoS s n k gets, and vice versa.…”

“…In [5] a context-aware MAC protocol is proposed to meet time-varying requirements of latency, energy consumption and packet loss rate. The energy efficiency problem in two-hop WBAN is investigated in [6] and [7]. To improve the performance of delay and energy efficiency, a low overhead energy-efficient routing scheme considering adaptive power control and routing in multi-hop WBAN is designed in [8].…”

ESR: Energy aware and stable routing protocol for WBAN networks

“…Designing such protocols implies challenges including the combination of path-reliability, short-range transmission, low data rate, low energy consumption, body mobility, and transmission security [1][2][3][4][5]. In particular, energy efficiency constitutes a significant factor for longterm deployment of WBANs, addressed by many works [6][7][8][9][10]. The class of wireless body network sets additional issues: the stability of the links.…”