A harvesting-rate oriented self-adaptive algorithm in Energy-Harvesting Wireless Body Area Networks

In Energy-Harvesting Wireless Body Area Networks (EH-WBANs), how to realize a power management strategy to enable lifetime operation is one of the most concern problems. To solve this problem, a feasible solution should be used to manage the harvested energy in sensor nodes in an EH-WBAN. So far, there are extensive studies about this issue for EH-WBANs. Unfortunately, the significant character of energy harvesting rates is ignored in existing solutions, which has immediate impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of energy harvesting in EH-WBANs. To handle this critical challenge, this paper propose a harvesting-rate oriented self-adaptive algorithm for enabling lifetime operation in EH-WBANs, in which a duty cycle can be dynamically adjusted to maintain the harvested energy amount always greater than the power consumption. In this study, the widely cited TDMA-based frame structure is chosen as the EH-WBAN architecture as well. To exploit the full potentials of the TDMA-based frame structure for energy harvesting, a self-adaptive mechanism is devised to adjust the on-to-off ratio within a duty cycle automatically in the proposal, in which the information of energy harvesting rates can be taken into account, regardless of the rates how varying in a nondeterministic manner and among various sensor nodes in EH-WBANs. To evaluate this algorithm, a demo is configured, which test results demonstrate the proposal is a promising candidate for realizing the lifetime operation in EH-WBANs.