An energy-efficient communication system using joint beamforming in multi-hop health monitoring sensor networks

This paper presents an energy-efficient wireless ad hoc communication system and baseband transceiver for sensor networks that gather vital sign information of patients. The design of the proposed system is aimed to facilitate an energy-efficient and low-latency vital sign data transmission service. Based on this aim, the proposed system adopts multi-hop transmission and joint transmitter-receiver beamforming technique to efficiently transmit data at significantly reduced transmission power. Furthermore, to shorten the transmission latency and reduce channel contention, we proposed a novel Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism which includes neighborhood discovery, packet collision detection and prioritized transmission scheme based on an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) physical layer. Simulation of transmission power, transmission latency, and data rate, together with proposed hardware architecture, were all carried out to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed system.