Energy saving and reliability for Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSN)

In healthcare and medical applications, the energy consumption of biosensor nodes affects the collection of biomedical data packets, which are sensed and measured from the human body and then transmitted toward the sink node. Nodes that are near to the sink node consume more energy as all biomedical packets are aggregated through these nodes when communicated to sink node. Each biosensor node in a wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) such as ECG (Electrocardiogram), should provide accurate biomedical data due to the paramount importance of patient information. We propose a technique to minimise energy consumed by biosensor nodes in the bottleneck zone for WBSNs, which applies the Coordinated Duty Cycle Algorithm (CDCA) to all nodes in the bottleneck zone. Superframe order (SO) selection in CDCA is based on real traffic and the priority of the nodes in the WBSN. Furthermore, we use a special case of network coding, called Random Linear Network coding (RLNC), to encode the biomedical packets to improve reliability through calculating the probability of successful reception (PSR) at the sink node. It can be concluded that CDCA outperforms other algorithms in terms of energy saving as it achieves energy savings for most biosensor nodes in WBSNs. RLNC employs relay nodes to achieve the required level of reliability in WBSNs and to guarantee that the biomedical data is delivered correctly to the sink nod

Study of MAC Protocols for Mobile Wireless Body Sensor Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) also referred to as a body sensor network (BSN), is a wireless network of wearable computing devices. It has emerged as a key technology to provide real-time health monitoring of a patient and diagnose many life threatening diseases. WBAN operates in close vicinity to, on, or inside a human body and supports a variety of medical and non-medical applications. The design of a medium access control is a challenge due to the characteristics of wireless channel and the need to fulfill both requirements of mobility support and energy efficiency.  This paper presents a comparative study of IEEE 802.15.6, IEEE 804.15.4 and T-MAC in order to analyze the performance of each standard in terms of delay, throughput and energy consumption. Keywords: Biomedical, IEEE 802.15.6; T-MAC, IEEE 802.15.4, mobility, low-power communication, wireless body sensor networks, implantable sensors, healthcare applications, biosensors

Topology design and cross-layer optimization for wireless body sensor networks

Wireless Body Sensor Networks play a crucial role in digital health care nowadays. Due to the size limitation on the sensor nodes and the life critical characteristics of the signals, there are stringent requirements on network’s reliability and energy efficiency. In this article, we propose a mathematical optimization problem that jointly considers network topology design and cross-layer optimization in WBSNs. We introduce multilevel primal and dual decomposition methods and manage to solve the proposed non-convex mixed-integer optimization problem. A solution with fast convergence rate based on binary search is provided. Simulation results have been supplemented to show that our proposed method yields much better performance than existing solutions

Towards energy saving wireless body sensor networks in health care systems

Postprint (published version

A New MAC Approach in Wireless Body Sensor Networks for Health Care

Postprint (published version

Adaptive Resource Allocation for Wireless Body Sensor Networks

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is an interesting technology for use in Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSN), where entire networks of sensors are carried by humans. In many environments the sensor nodes experience external interference for example, when the WBSN is operated in the 2.4 GHz ISM band and the human moves in a densely populated city, it will likely experience WiFi interference, with a quickly changing ``interference landscape''. In this thesis we propose Adaptive Resource Allocation schemes, to be carried out by the WBSN, which provided noticeable performance gains in such environments. We investigate a range of adaptation schemes and assess their performance both through simulations and experimentally

An Asynchronous Multi-Sensor Micro Control Unit for Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs)

In this work, an asynchronous multi-sensor micro control unit (MCU) core is proposed for wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs). It consists of asynchronous interfaces, a power management unit, a multi-sensor controller, a data encoder (DE), and an error correct coder (ECC). To improve the system performance and expansion abilities, the asynchronous interface is created for handshaking different clock domains between ADC and RF with MCU. To increase the use time of the WBSN system, a power management technique is developed for reducing power consumption. In addition, the multi-sensor controller is designed for detecting various biomedical signals. To prevent loss error from wireless transmission, use of an error correct coding technique is important in biomedical applications. The data encoder is added for lossless compression of various biomedical signals with a compression ratio of almost three. This design is successfully tested on a FPGA board. The VLSI architecture of this work contains 2.68-K gate counts and consumes power 496-μW at 133-MHz processing rate by using TSMC 0.13-μm CMOS process. Compared with the previous techniques, this work offers higher performance, more functions, and lower hardware cost than other micro controller designs