Proactive and Reactive Transmission Power Control for Energy-Efficient On-Body Communications

In wireless body sensor network (WBSNs), the human body has an important effect on the performance of the communication due to the temporal variations caused and the attenuation and fluctuation of the path loss. This fact suggests that the transmission power must adapt to the current state of the link in a way that it ensures a balance between energy consumption and packet loss. In this paper, we validate our two transmission power level policies (reactive and predictive approaches) using the Castalia simulator. The integration of our experimental measurements in the simulator allows us to easily evaluate complex scenarios, avoiding the difficulties associated with a practical realization. Our results show that both schemes perform satisfactorily, providing overall energy savings of 24% and 22% for a case of study, as compared to the maximum transmission power mode.