Woosik Lee, Namgi Kim, Byoung-Dai Lee, Journal of Information Processing Systems Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 593-603, Jun. 2019  

10.3745/JIPS.03.0118
Keywords: healthcare system, Transmission Power Control, Wireless Body Sensor Network
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Abstract

In wearable healthcare systems, sensor devices can be deployed in places around the human body such as the stomach, back, arms, and legs. The sensors use tiny batteries, which have limited resources, and old sensor batteries must be replaced with new batteries. It is difficult to deploy sensor devices directly into the human body. Therefore, instead of replacing sensor batteries, increasing the lifetime of sensor devices is more efficient. A transmission power control (TPC) algorithm is a representative technique to increase the lifetime of sensor devices. Sensor devices using a TPC algorithm control their transmission power level (TPL) to reduce battery energy consumption. The TPC algorithm operates on a closed-loop mechanism that consists of two parts, such as sensor and sink devices. Most previous research considered only the sink part of devices in the closed-loop. If we consider both the sensor and sink parts of a closed-loop mechanism, sensor devices reduce energy consumption more than previous systems that only consider the sensor part. In this paper, we propose a new approach to consider both the sensor and sink as part of a closed-loop mechanism for efficient energy management of sensor devices. Our proposed approach judges the current channel condition based on the values of various body sensors. If the current channel is not optimal, sensor devices maintain their current TPL without communication to save the sensor’s batteries. Otherwise, they find an optimal TPL. To compare performance with other TPC algorithms, we implemented a TPC algorithm and embedded it into sensor devices. Our experimental results show that our new algorithm is better than other TPC algorithms, such as linear, binary, hybrid, and ATPC.

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