A greedy buffer allocation algorithm for power-aware communication in body sensor networks

Monitoring human movements using wireless sensory devices promises to revolutionize the delivery of healthcare services. In spite of their potentials for many application domains, power requirements and wearability have limited the commercialization of these systems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for optimizing communication energy by reducing inter-node data transmissions. This is accomplished by introducing buffers that limit communication to short bursts, and therefore decrease power usage and simplify the communication. Our buffer allocation is a greedy algorithm that can operate both in a centralized and distributed architecture. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our power reduction techniques. Our results show that, compared with an unbuffered system, our system achieves more than 30% reduction in energy consumption.