Packet Forwarding with Minimum Energy Consumption in Body Area Sensor Networks

Body area sensor networks (BASNs) are powered by batteries and hence energy is a scarce resource. Thus communication protocols in BASN need to be energy efficient. This paper addresses this problem by proposing a Minimum Energy Packet Forwarding Protocol (MEPF). First, we analyze the tradeoff of energy consumption between lower transmission power and packet retransmission. Then we propose the transmission power control part of MEPF. It transmits a packet using the minimum transmission power that can guarantee a high packet reception rate. Unlike the previous work, we not only need to adjust the power of the forward transmission but also the ACKs, which further reduces the consumption. MEPF outstands from the earlier works by also retransmitting lost packets when a link is good enough. The quality of the link is dynamically judged by a machine learning algorithm which also considers the limited buffer space in a sensor node. By MEPF, the energy consumption to forward a packet is minimized without sacrificing the packet reception ratio. Experimental results show quantitatively that MEPF save significant amounts of energy.