Energy Saving and Reliability for Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSN)

Abstract

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 the sink node. Each biosensor node in a wireless body sensor network (WBSN) such as electrocardiogram (ECG), should provide accurate biomedical data due to the paramount importance of patient information. We propose a technique to minimize 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 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 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 node.