Joint Power-QoS Control Scheme for Energy Harvesting Body Sensor Nodes

Abstract — In this paper, we aim at the optimal use of the scarce energy collected by a node powered by human energy harvesting in order to improve the provided Quality of Service (QoS). To achieve this goal, we have developed a Power-QoS control scheme, called PEH-QoS. PEH-QoS is composed of three sub-modules that interact with each other in order to make optimal use of energy and get the best possible QoS. The scheme intends to ensure that a node can both capture/detect the medical events and transmit the respective data packets efficiently. One of the main features of our mechanism is that only useful data sequences are transmitted, discarding data packets that have lost their clinical validity (i.e., out of date). Extensive simulations have been conducted in order to evaluate the behavior of PEH-QoS in a typical medical node under energy harvesting conditions. Index Terms—Body node, quality of service, energy harvesting, WBAN, Medium Access Control (MAC). I