Motion aware transmission power control scheme in wireless body area network

Energy consumption is a key issue in wireless body area network (WBAN) since the wearable sensor devices are severely resource-constrained. In this paper, we present a novel transmission power control scheme, which exploit the regular body motion in dynamic wireless channel for WBAN. We first investigate the relationship between the link state and body movement with experiment, and give the evidence that the path loss is strongly related to the body movement. We then propose the motion aware transmission power control (M-TPC) scheme which takes advantage of the information from activity recognition algorithm and arranges transmission when the transmitter is at the desire location. Finally, we implement and evaluate the proposed scheme on ZigBee platform with CC2530 radio, and also compare with the real-time reactive scheme in walking scenario. The experimental results show that the M-TPC scheme reduces transmission power by 43.27% and enhances the link reliability by reducing the packet loss rate by 75%.