On the Design of an Energy Efficient Data Collection Scheme for Body Area Nano Networks

Abstract

With the recent advancements in nanotechnologies, Body Area Nanonetworks (BANNETs) are expected to be a promising solution for many critical biomedical applications. Due to the extremely small size of nanomachines, serious energy limitation becomes a challenging roadblock stunting the development of BANNETs. As an initial step towards this end, this paper focuses on the design of an energy-efficient data collection scheme in BANNETs. First, a sleep/wake-up mechanism is introduced to avoid the unnecessary energy consumption when no external request comes. Then, with a careful consideration of both node available energy and transmission energy consumption, we design a new node selection strategy to further reduce the energy consumption in the data collection process. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations for both the proposed data collection scheme and the benchmark greedy scheme to illustrate the energy efficiency of our scheme as well as to discuss the impacts of network parameters on network performance.