Data Collection Scheme Based on Wake-up in Body Area Nanonetworks

Recent advances in wireless communication, nanotechnology and networking paradigms made it possible to envision and design innovative healthcare services that were not feasible before. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) represents a class of emerging and important network model, which can provide continuous health monitoring and the real-time reporting of patients' vital signs. One typical and promising application scenario of WBAN is Body Area Nanonetwork (BANN), where nanosensors are distributed in the human body to measure all kinds of body parameters (e.g., the presence of glucose in blood, cholesterol, and infectious agents), gather related data and transmit these data to external entities for further use. The extremely limited energy storage in nanosensors necessitates the design of energy efficient protocols (e.g., data collection schemes) for such networks. Based on this, we propose the design of data collection scheme based on wake-up mechanism in BANNs. More specially, this scheme involves a hierarchical (i.e., nanointerface, nanorouter, and nanonode) collection structure with nanointerface receiving external requests and returning the requested data, nanorouter collecting data from nanonodes and nanonodes gathering data from human body. In the data collection process, each nanorouter first activates the nanonodes in a rectangle region (i.e., wake-up region) and obtains the available energy level of each nanonode in this region. Each nanorouter then selects the nanonode with the largest available energy in the wake-up region to return the requested data. Finally, simulation results are provided to illustrate the performances of our scheme in terms of the average available energy and path loss. These results show that better performances can be achieved when size of the network (i.e. density of nanonodes) is from 1.0 to 1.5 nanonodes/mm(2).