Path-Loss Based Power Efficient Relay Networking for WCE in Body Area Networks

Body Area Networks (BANs) has great potential to provide real-time health monitoring of a patient and diagnose many life threatening diseases. The wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is one of the promising Body Area Networks (BANs) applications that provides a noninvasive way to inspect the entire Gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The low operating power of the capsule is the most critical factor to ensure the performance of WCE. In this paper, we investigate the power efficient relay networking based on path-loss to reduce the transmitting power consumption of WCE which passes through two major digestive organs, small intestine and large intestine, in the human body. According to the deployment of relay sensors, we provide analysis of the maximum and minimum consumed power for the capsule with different relay sensor number and different angle. Simulation results show that when the number of relay sensors on body surface extends to specific numbers (23 for large intestine, 14 for small intestine), the deployment of relay networking has almost no influence of the power consumption for the capsule. When the number of relay nodes is under some specific number, the angle and number has huge effect on the power consumption. At the same time, we verify the optimal selection and deployment of on-body sensors to minimize the WCE power consumption.