Priority aware scheduling algorithm for wireless energy harvesting of sensor nodes in wireless body area networks

Abstract

Energy harvesting, also known as energy scavenging, is the process by which energy is extracted from external sources such as inductive power, natural energy, salinity gradients and kinetic energy. Among the energy harvesting techniques, inductive powering known as wireless power transfer (WPT), has gained the popularity over the wired technologies due to its convenience in mobility. Evidently, WPT opens up the possibility of transferring power wirelessly to the tiny and resource limited sensor nodes in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), a time critical network for monitoring various physiological information of patients in real time. However, the performance of WBAN may degrade severely due to its limited capacity of storing energy that is required for the continuous operation of sensor nodes, especially for those implanted in human body. Therefore, improvement of driver e ciency as well as an efficient charging scheme are drawing much attention in the research community more recently. In this research work, an efficient saturating class-C driver is proposed by exploring the specific parameters of drain-to-source voltage to implement single MOSFET topology instead of two parallel MOSFETs design topology in the conventional driver. Furthermore, to search for a better voltage regulation compared to the saturating class-C driver, a current limiting inductance model is suggested for class-E driver. Finally, to improve the charging efficiency, an e effective priority aware scheduling algorithm is proposed for charging the tiny resource limited sensor nodes in WBAN. After exploring circuit parameters by using MATLAB, simulation is conducted with SPICE to justify the proposed improvements. Furthermore, simulation results show that proposed priority aware scheduling algorithm improves the performance of existing WBAN.