Minimizing Energy Consumption in Body Sensor Networks via Convex Optimization

  • Authors:
  • Sidharth Nabar;Jeffrey Walling;Radha Poovendran

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • BSN '10 Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Body Sensor Networks
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) consist of miniature sensors deployed on or implanted into the human body for health monitoring. Conserving the energy of these sensors, while guaranteeing a required level of performance, is a key challenge in BSNs. In terms of communication protocols, this translates to minimizing energy consumption while limiting the latency in data transfer. In this paper, we focus on polling-based communication protocols for BSNs, and address the problem of optimizing the polling schedule to achieve minimal energy consumption and latency. We show that this problem can be posed as a geometric program, which belongs to the class of convex optimization problems, solvable in polynomial time. We also introduce a dynamic priority vector for each sensor, based on the observation that relative priorities of sensors in a BSN change over time. This vector is used to develop a decision-tree based approach for resolving scheduling conflicts among devices. The proposed framework is applicable to a broad class of periodic polling-based communication protocols. We design one such protocol in detail and show that it achieves an improvement of approximately 45\% over the widely accepted standard IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol.