Evaluation of body sensor network platforms: a design space and benchmarking analysis

Abstract

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) consist of sensor nodes deployed on the human body for health monitoring. Each sensor node is implemented by interfacing a physiological sensor with a sensor platform consisting of components such as microcontroller, radio and memory. Diverse needs of BSN applications require customized platform development for optimizing performance. In this paper, we propose a two-phase framework to evaluate the performance of sensor platforms to match a BSN's computation, communication and sensing requirements: 1) Design Space Determination, wherein we investigate salient features of BSN platforms and quantify them as design coordinates through evaluation metrics such as SPSW (Samples Processed per Second per Watt) and EPC (Expected Power Consumption). To measure these metrics for a platform under typical BSN application workloads, we propose BSN-Bench, a benchmarking suite composed of basic tasks that occur in diverse BSN applications. BSNBench enables an accurate profiling of platforms based on the design coordinates; 2) Design Space Exploration, wherein we explore the design space to find the most suitable platform for a given application. We demonstrate the usage of our framework through a case study, where we consider two practical BSN applications and choose suitable platforms for them.