Node-Position-Based Joint Relay Selection and Adaptive Power Control Scheme in Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

Sport and healthcare monitoring have become more and more popular in our everyday life, benefiting from the deploying of Wireless Body Area Networks. In these cases, data transmission reliability should be studied to receive the accurate real-time feedbacks, which contain rich biomedical information, such as heartbeat, and breathing process. However, wireless on-body channels experience significant temporal variation due to body movements and single-hop communication scheme cannot adapt to highly dynamic network topology. In this paper, a joint relay selection and power control scheme (JRP) is proposed to improve transmission reliability. We take running activity for experimental study, the influence of nodes’ positions to radio performance is evaluated. By analyzing the source and destination, JRP can decide the way to finish this communication by either relay selection or power control. In addition, the acceleration of each node is measured by accelerometers. Thus, with the help of real-time received signal strength indication and acceleration, JRP can pick several potential relay nodes for the source node’s transmission request. Finally, the experimental result shows that our scheme can achieve a good tradeoff between reliability and energy consumption.