Energy harvesting based WBANs: EH optimization methods

Abstract Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBAN) are a special case of wireless sensor networks (WSN), developed to operate at the human body scale. Thus, energy efficiency is one of the major aspects that must be taken into consideration before designing any WBAN solution, because the change of batteries could be very difficult, especially when sensors are implanted inside the human body. For this reason, several research projects have been carried out on the adoption of energy harvesting schemes, that aim to collect energy from several sources surrounding the human body (sun, body warmth, movements, heartbeat, RF radiation ...) and transform it into an electrical energy to power the nodes of a WBAN. Nevertheless, this harvested energy must also be better exploited, given the temporal variation nature of these alternative sources. The purpose of this paper is to present a general overview of energy harvesting schemes, as well as methods in literature focusing on optimizing the exploitation of the harvested energy in a WBAN, through Mac, routing or physical layer protocols.