Rate Control to Reduce Bioeffects in Wireless Biomedical Sensor Networks

Abstract

During the course of physiological information monitoring by wireless biomedical sensor networks, adverse biological effects will be caused by wireless radio frequency radiation, especially for long term, intensive and close inspection. This paper is concerned with bioeffect metric to evaluate the performance of wireless biosensor networks in terms of health effect consideration, and a price-based rate control algorithm to reduce the bioeffect. This paper first investigates the bioeffects caused by radiofrequency transmission of sensor node, including thermal effects and athermal effects. The bioeffects model is studied in both near-field and far-field, in relation to specific absorption rate (SAR). The main contribution of this work is that a normalized bioeffect metric, equivalent coefficient-of-absorption-and-bioeffects (CAB), is derived to evaluate and design the communication protocols for wireless biosensor networks. After identifying the factors that can reduce the adverse health effects in the communication system we present a bioeffect aware rate control algorithm for the system