Temporal correlation model-based transmission power control in wireless body area network

Abstract

Researchers have encountered many challenges in developing communication system in wireless body area networks (WBANs). These challenges include the dynamic characteristics of WBAN channels, limited energy resources, and strict requirements, such as high reliability and low latency. To achieve highly reliable and energy-efficient communication in the WBAN, temporal correlation model-based transmission power control (TCM-TPC) is proposed. In this method, the channel condition is firstly determined based on a long-term mean channel gain and the last known channel gain using a temporal correlation model. The channel is estimated as a conditional distribution of channel gains. After that, the transmit output power is selected from the estimated channel to satisfy a pre-defined outage probability. Performance of the proposed TCM-TPC method was evaluated on a network simulator for a walking scenario. The evaluation results showed that the TCM-TPC had up to 1.48% of packet loss, while other TPC methods had up to 6.86% of packet loss. Furthermore, for a high data rate application, the TCM-TPC showed the lowest energy consumption for all sensor nodes.