Joint Power Allocation and Coordinator Deployment for Wireless Body Area Network

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are made up of tiny physiological sensors implanted in/on the human body that communicate with a coordinator. The specific characteristics of WBANs propose challenges and difficulties on resource allocation, coordinator deployment and service Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee, etc. In this paper, jointly considering the issues, including various QoS requirements of sensor nodes, the characteristics of channels between sensor nodes and the coordinator, and the posture states of human bodies, the problem of joint power allocation and coordinator deployment is formulated as an energy consumption minimization problem subject to sensor service and power constraints. Through solving the optimization problem, the optimal transmission power and the location of the coordinator can be obtained. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is capable of achieving energy efficiency of sensor nodes and guaranteeing user QoS requirements as well.