Energy Optimization of ZigBee Based WBAN for Patient Monitoring

This paper proposes an energy efficient wireless telemonitoring scenario of cardiac patients through ZigBee, based on variable duty cycle being rendered to sensors. In an intra hospital telemedicine scenario, Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals of patients are acquired through ECG sensor nodes having transmission capability and these ECG signals are received by Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) kept at nursing station through ZigBee network. ECG signals are further transmitted to Doctor's PDA. If the duty cycle is varied as per the load or number of active sensors, total energy consumed in idle mode can be avoided and total energy consumed by sensors is reduced hence increasing total network lifetime. This paper, comparatively analyzes the energy efficiency of ZigBee sensors with different percentage of duty cycle on the basis of energy consumption parameter under variable load conditions. The matrices used in performance evaluation are energy consumption in transmit mode, energy consumption in received mode and energy consumption in idle mode using Qualnet 5.0.2 simulator.