Electronic health monitoring is one of the major applications of wireless body area networks (WBANs) that helps with early detection of any abnormal physiological symptoms. In this paper, we propose and solve an optimization problem that maximizes the energy efficiency (EE) of WBAN consisting of sensor nodes (SNs) equipped with energy harvesting capabilities communicating with an aggregator. We exploit the structure of the optimization problem to provide a sub-optimal solution at a lower computational complexity and derive the mathematical expressions of upper and lower bounds of the source rates of the SN. The simulation results reveal that the optimal allocation of the source rate to energy critical SNs improves the system performance of WBAN in terms of energy efficiency during different everyday activities.
We study wireless power transmission by an energy source to multiple energy harvesting nodes with the aim to maximize the energy efficiency. The source transmits energy to the nodes using one of the available power levels in each time slot and the nodes transmit information back to the energy source using the harvested energy. The source does not have any channel state information and it only knows whether a received codeword from a given node was successfully decoded or not. With this limited information, the source has to learn the optimal power level that maximizes the energy efficiency of the network. We model the problem as a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits problem and develop an Upper Confidence Bound based algorithm, which learns the optimal transmit power of the energy source that maximizes the energy efficiency. Numerical results validate the performance guarantees of the proposed algorithm and show significant gains compared to the benchmark schemes.
Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks (WBASNs) consist of on-body or in-body sensors placed on human body for health monitoring. Energy conservation of these sensors, while guaranteeing a required level of performance, is a challenging task. Energy efficient routing schemes are designed for the longevity of network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol for measuring fatigue of a soldier. Three sensors are attached to soldiers body that monitor specific parameters. Our proposed protocol is an event driven protocol and takes three scenarios for measuring the fatigue of a soldier. We evaluate our proposed work in terms of network lifetime, throughput, remaining energy of sensors and fatigue of a soldier.
One of the major challenges in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is to prolong the lifetime of network. Traditional research work focuses on minimizing transmit power, however, in the case of short range communication the consumption power in decoding is significantly larger than transmit power. This paper investigates the minimization of total power consumption by reducing the decoding power consumption. For achieving a desired Bit Error Rate (BER), we introduce some fundamental results on the basis of iterative message-passing algorithms for Low Density Parity Check Code (LDPC). To reduce energy dissipation in decoder, LDPC based coded communications between sensors are considered. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of LDPC at different code rates and introduce Adaptive Iterative Decoding (AID) by exploiting threshold on the number of iterations for a certain BER. In iterative LDPC decoding, the total energy consumption of network is reduced by 20 to 25 percent.
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) is a promising solution to build a programmable wireless environment via steering the incident signal in fully customizable ways with reconfigurable passive elements. In this paper, we consider a RIS-aided multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) downlink communication system. Our objective is to maximize the weighted sum-rate (WSR) of all users by joint designing the beamforming at the access point (AP) and the phase vector of the RIS elements, while both the perfect channel state information (CSI) setup and the imperfect CSI setup are investigated. For perfect CSI setup, a low-complexity algorithm is proposed to obtain the stationary solution for the joint design problem by utilizing the fractional programming technique. Then, we resort to the stochastic successive convex approximation technique and extend the proposed algorithm to the scenario wherein the CSI is imperfect. The validity of the proposed methods is confirmed by numerical results. In particular, the proposed algorithm performs quite well when the channel uncertainty is smaller than 10%.
This paper unveils the importance of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in a wireless powered sensor network (WPSN). Specifically, a multi-antenna power station (PS) employs energy beamforming to provide wireless charging for multiple Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which utilize the harvested energy to deliver their own messages to an access point (AP). Meanwhile, an IRS is deployed to enhance the performances of wireless energy transfer (WET) and wireless information transfer (WIT) by intelligently adjusting the phase shift of each reflecting element. To evaluate the performance of this IRS assisted WPSN, we are interested in maximizing its system sum throughput to jointly optimize the energy beamforming of the PS, the transmission time allocation, as well as the phase shifts of the WET and WIT phases. The formulated problem is not jointly convex due to the multiple coupled variables. To deal with its non-convexity, we first independently find the phase shifts of the WIT phase in closed-form. We further propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to iteratively solve the sum throughput maximization problem. To be specific, a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation approach is adopted to design the energy beamforming and the time allocation for given phase shifts of WET phase, which is then optimized for given energy beamforming and time allocation. Moreover, we propose an AO low-complexity scheme to significantly reduce the computational complexity incurred by the SDP relaxation, where the optimal closed-form energy beamforming, time allocation, and phase shifts of the WET phase are derived. Finally, numerical results are demonstrated to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, and highlight the beneficial role of the IRS in comparison to the benchmark schemes.