Network lifetime maximization based joint resource optimization for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are made up of tiny physiological sensors implanted in/on the human body which detect the health status of human body and transmit the information collected to the remote server via one or more coordinators. The rapid proliferation of WBANs has stimulated enormous research efforts that aim to maximize the lifetime of battery-powered sensor nodes and extend the overall network lifetime through designing optimal power allocation or relay selection schemes. However, previous works fail to jointly optimize the highly related resources of WBANs, thus may severely limit the performance of maximizing the network lifetime of WBANs. In this paper, a network lifetime maximization based joint resource allocation scheme is proposed for WBANs. We show that the problem of optimizing network lifetime is equivalent to maximizing the residual energy of sensor nodes which can be expressed as function of transmission modes of nodes, cooperative nodes, transmission power and time slots of both source and relay nodes, subject to resource allocation constraints. Through solving the optimization problem, an optimal joint transmission mode, relay selection, transmission power and time slot allocation strategy can be obtained. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is capable for extending the lifetime of network as well as guaranteeing user QoS requirements.