Energy Performance of High Data Rate and Low Power Transceiver based Wireless Body Area Networks

(SB), nRF24L01+, Energy-efficient strategies Abstract: Emerging Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are receiving increasing interest from researchers and designers. Specific requirements for small-scale dimensions, low-latency, lightweight and limited power capacity mean that the key challenge in WBANs design is in the adoption of energy-efficient strategies for better system performance, and in the efficient use of high data-rate and ultra-low-power transceivers. This paper presents a high-level energy-aware SystemC-based model and simulation of Nordic's Enhanced ShockBurst (ESB) and ShockBurst (SB) baseband protocol engine. The model includes data from energy consumption experiments using nRF24L01+ transceiver, enabling detailed exploration of energy conversation strategies. With this model, we show that a high data-rate ESB and SB transmission at 2Mbps can save more than 60% and 80% energy respectively, and it has 3x higher lifetime expectancy than the 250Kbps low data-rate communication with a payload collecting strategy.