Network Coding for Energy Efficient Transmission in Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is a technology that has revolutionized the health-care industry by allowing remote monitoring, early detection and prevention of diseases. Patients can be remotely monitored thanks to implant devices in the body or by placing nodes on different parts of the body. Often the deployed sensor nodes are constraint by limited battery sources and are required to continuously collect the data and transfer it to the sink node, thus requiring energy efficient communication schemes. In addition, in poor channel conditions, this data collection and transfer results in retransmission thus wasting useful energy. This work presents a cooperative network coding based transmission technique for spectrum and energy efficiency in WBANs. The bit error rate (BER) of the network coded path in comparison to direct communication approach is explored. The effect of WBAN path loss due to different node positions is also discussed. It is observed that node position greatly affects path loss and received power which in turn affect the BERs. Simulation results show that network coded cooperative communication strategy in WBAN channel with and without combining outperforms as compared to direct communication.