Throughput Improvement in Backscatter-based Wireless Body Area Network

Abstract

We consider a wireless body sensor network (WBAN) which utilizes backscatter technology for transmission between sensor nodes and the gateway. Backscatter is a passive communication technology which enables a self-sustainable communication operation, thus it is effective and desired in energy constrained network such as WBAN. In this backscatter-based WBAN, gateway not only receives the sensor data but also has a role of power source continuously emitting RF carrier signal to stimulate the transmissions. As the backscatter communication can work in a battery-less fashion, the first priority design target is to improve the network throughput. Toward this, emitting power and transmission time are jointly optimized by leveraging the periodic fluctuation of WBAN channel. The idea of this work is based on that fact that the temporal fluctuation of WBAN channel caused by walking movements can be predicted, and the throughput improvement can be thus formulated as a convex optimization problem which derives a highly effective resources allocation strategy. Our experimental results show that the proposed solution can significantly improve the throughput performance.