Energy efficient transmission strategies for Body Sensor Networks with energy harvesting

This paper addresses the problem of developing energy efficient transmission strategies for Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) with energy harvesting capabilities. It is assumed that two transmission modes that allow a tradeoff between the energy consumption and packet error probability are available to the sensors. Decision policies are developed to determine the transmission mode to use at a given instant of time in order to maximize the quality of coverage. The problem is formulated in a Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework and an upper bound on the performance of arbitrary policies is determined. Our results show that the quality of coverage associated with the MDP formulation outperforms the other policies.