5th International ICST Conference on Body Area Networks

Research Article

Mobile Device Aided Cooperative Transmission for Body Area Networks

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1145/2221924.2221939,
        author={Rong Yu and Yan Zhang and Ruchao Gao},
        title={Mobile Device Aided Cooperative Transmission for Body Area Networks},
        proceedings={5th International ICST Conference on Body Area Networks},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={BODYNETS},
        year={2012},
        month={6},
        keywords={Body area network cooperative transmission bit error rate},
        doi={10.1145/2221924.2221939}
    }
    
  • Rong Yu
    Yan Zhang
    Ruchao Gao
    Year: 2012
    Mobile Device Aided Cooperative Transmission for Body Area Networks
    BODYNETS
    ACM
    DOI: 10.1145/2221924.2221939
Rong Yu1, Yan Zhang2,*, Ruchao Gao1
  • 1: South China University of Technology
  • 2: Simula Research Laboratory
*Contact email: yanzhang@ieee.org

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a mobile device aided cooperative transmission scheme for Body Area Networks (BANs). Usually, a BAN is required to operate in a very low power level to conserve energy consumption and reduce the electromagnetic radiation impact on human body. Cooperative transmission is an efficient technique to enhance the transmission reliability and maintain a low transmission power. In the proposed cooperation scheme, a mobile device acts as the relay of the network and help the sensors to forward the data it has received. Rake receiver for Ultra WideBand (UWB) receiving and Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) method are employed to deal with the multipath reflections of BAN channel. The power allocation between the sensor and the mobile device is optimized to enhance the transmission reliability. The simulation result shows that the proposed cooperative transmission scheme can significantly reduce the Bit Error Rate (BER) and prolong the system lifetime, compared to the non-cooperative scheme. The BER gain is over one order in the high SNR region, while the energy consumption is 20% off in the low BER region.