Abstract
Swallowable body sensor networks (BSNs) are composed of sensors which are swallowed by patients and send the collected data to the outside coordinator. These sensors are energy constraint and the batteries are difficult to be replaced. The medium access control (MAC) protocol plays an important role in energy management. This paper investigates an energy efficient MAC protocol design for swallowable BSNs. Multi-hop communication is analyzed and proved more energy efficient than single-hop communication within the human body when the circuitry power is low. Based on this result, a centrally controlled time slotting schedule is proposed. The major workload is shifted from the sensors to the coordinator. The coordinator collects the path-loss map and calculates the schedules, including routing, slot assignment and transmission power. Sensor nodes follow the schedules to send data in a multi-hop way. The proposed protocol is compared with the IEEE 802.15.6 protocol in terms of energy consumption. The results show that it is more energy efficient than IEEE 802.15.6 for swallowable BSN scenarios.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 19457-19476 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Sensors |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue number | 10 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Oct 17 2014 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
ASJC Scopus Subject Areas
- Analytical Chemistry
- Information Systems
- Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
- Biochemistry
- Instrumentation
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Keywords
- Body sensor networks
- Energy efficiency
- MAC
- Multi-hop
