Energy Harvesting-Assisted Cognitive Sensor Nodes in Wireless Body Area Networks

This paper aims to propose and analyze an energy-and spectrum-efficient wireless body area network (WBAN) for smart healthcare applications. On one hand, we focus on improving the spectrum utilization in WBANs by incorporating an overlay cognitive radio (CR) paradigm that allows the co-existence of various sensor nodes as primary and secondary users based on their applications i.e., medical or non-medical. On the other hand, we employ an energy harvesting (EH) based time-switching cooperation protocol through the secondary device to improve energy efficiency. We evaluate the performance of the proposed overlay CR WBAN in terms of outage probability, throughput and energy efficiency, and thereby provide practical design guidelines in IoT-based e-healthcare framework. Above all, we assess the correctness of the proposed analytical framework when compared to Monte Carlo simulations.