Saving energy for the data collection point in WBAN network

Wireless sensor networking (WSN) has been rapidly developed and become essential in various domains including health care systems. Such systems use WSN to collect real-time medical sensed data, aiming at improving the patient safety. For instance, patients suffered from adverse events, i.e., cardiac or respiratory arrests, are monitored so as to prevent them from getting harm. Sensors are placed on, in or near the patients’ body to continuously collect sensing data such as the electrocardiograms, blood oxygenation, breathing, and heart rate. In this case, the sensors form a subcategory of WSN called wireless body area network (WBAN). In WBAN, sensing data are sent to one or more data collection points called personal server (PS). The role of PS is important since it forwards sensed data, to a medical server via a Bluetooth/WLAN connection in real time to support storage of information and real-time diagnosis, the device can also issue a notification of an emergency status. Since PS is a battery-based device, when its battery is empty, it will disconnect the sensed medical data with the rest network. To best of our knowledge, very few studies that focus on saving energy for the PS. To this end, this work investigates the trade-off between energy consumption for wireless communication and the amount of sensing data. An energy consumption model for wireless communication has been proposed based on direct measurement using real testbed. According to our findings, it is possible to save energy for the PS by selecting suitable wireless technology to be used based on the amount of data to be transmitted.