Experimental study on adaptive power control based routing in multi-hop Wireless Body Area Networks

Data transmission reliability and energy efficiency are most crucial for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) to perform healthcare monitoring. In this paper, we jointly consider adaptive power control and routing in multi-hop WBANs, and develop a low overhead energy-efficient routing scheme (EERS). The proposed EERS can establish an energy-efficient end-to-end path as well as adaptively choose transmission power for sensor nodes. We conduct extensive experiments on a MicaZ platform to compare the performance of the proposed EERS and the collection tree protocol (CTP) in terms of packet reception ratio (PRR), collection delay, energy consumption, and energy balancing. Experimental results show that EERS outperforms CTP in terms of reliability, delay and energy consumption. In particular, EERS reduces nearly 30% mean delay as compared to CTP, and saves 10% energy consumed by CTP at the default power (0dBm) while achieving at least 0.95 PRR.