Energy saving efficiency comparison of transmit power control and link adaptation in BANs

The wireless channels in Body Area Networks (BANs) have significant temporal variations due to body movements. Therefore there is a potential to save energy by exploiting adaptive schemes, such as transmit power control (PC) and link adaptation (LA). This paper investigates the energy saving efficiency of PC and LA in BANs. The theoretical bounds of energy saving efficiency of PC and LA, and the condition that LA outperforms PC are derived. Generally speaking, LA is more efficient in saving energy than PC in BANs. The energy saving efficiency and packet erasure rate (PER) of PC and LA are evaluated through simulations with a large measured dataset from a BAN testbed. The simulation results show that LA can save 80-85% more energy than PC during 80% time. The increased PER due to the adaptive schemes is below 1% during 80-95% time at the different links.