Wireless technology enables novel approaches to healthcare, in particular the
remote monitoring of vital signs and other parameters indicative of people's
health. This paper considers a system scenario relevant to such applications,
where a smart-phone acts as a data-collecting hub, gathering data from a number
of wireless-capable body sensors, and relaying them to a healthcare provider
host through standard existing cellular networks. Delay of critical data and
sensors' energy efficiency are both relevant and conflicting issues. Therefore,
it is important to operate the wireless body-area sensor network at some
desired point close to the optimal energy-delay tradeoff curve. This tradeoff
curve is a function of the employed physical-layer protocol: in particular, it
depends on the multiple-access scheme and on the coding and modulation schemes
available. In this work, we consider a protocol closely inspired by the
widely-used Bluetooth standard. First, we consider the calculation of the
minimum energy function, i.e., the minimum sum energy per symbol that
guarantees the stability of all transmission queues in the network. Then, we
apply the general theory developed by Neely to develop a dynamic scheduling
policy that approaches the optimal energy-delay tradeoff for the network at
hand. Finally, we examine the queue dynamics and propose a novel policy that
adaptively switches between connected and disconnected (sleeping) modes. We
demonstrate that the proposed policy can achieve significant gains in the
realistic case where the control "NULL" packets necessary to maintain the
connection alive, have a non-zero energy cost, and the data arrival statistics
corresponding to the sensed physical process are bursty.Comment: Extended version (with proofs details in the Appendix) of a paper
accepted for publication on the IEEE Transactions on Communication