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Energy efficient wireless body area network design in health monitoring scenarios

University of British Columbia

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are one of the key technologies that support the development of ubiquitous health monitoring, which has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Wireless on-body sensors free the patients from countless tangled wires, and wireless implanted sensors make it possible for the doctors to monitor an extensive range of critical bio-information continuously, which is crucial for a quick reaction when emergency happens. Due to the size limitation on the sensor nodes and the importance of the life signals transmitted, compared with general wireless sensor networks (WSNs), WBANs have more stringent requirements on reliability and energy efficiency during data's collection and transmission. This thesis aims to propose effective network designs to increase packet delivery rate, reduce energy consumption and prolong network lifetime for WBANs. In order to solve the major challenges faced by WBANs, due to the energy efficiency and reliable data transmission requirements, in this thesis, network design over multiple layers are considered, including physical layer, medium access control (MAC) layer and routing layer. Network topology design that is suitable for WBANs is also considered. Specifically this thesis: 1. Investigates the design of MAC protocols and proposes an opportunistic scheduling scheme by applying heuristic scheduling and dynamic superframe length adjustment to improve the packet delivery rate and improve transmission reliability; 2. Formulates and solves a mathematical optimization problem to maximize network lifetime, which jointly considers network topology design, transmission power control and routing strategy. Multilevel primal and dual decomposition methods are employed to solve the proposed non-convex mixed-integer optimization problem. A solution with fast convergence rate based on binary search is provided. Simulations have been conducted to show that our proposed network design increases network performance to a large extent compared with existing solutions.

Text

2017-03-20

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/60952

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/