Ultralow Power Energy Harvesting Body Area Network Design: A Case Study

This paper presents an energy harvesting wireless sensor network (EHWSN) architecture designed for use within an astronaut's space suit. The contribution of this work spans both physical (PHY) layer energy harvesting transceiver design and low power medium access control (MAC) solutions. The architecture consists of a star topology with two types of transceiver nodes: a powered gateway radio (GR) node and multiple energy harvesting biosensor radio (BSR) nodes. To demonstrate the feasibility of an EHWSN at the PHY layer, a representative BSR node is implemented. The BSR node is powered by a thermal energy harvesting system (TEHS) which exploits the difference between the temperatures of a space suit's cooling garment and the astronaut's body. It is shown that, through appropriate control of the duty cycle in transmission and receiving modes, it is possible to operate with less than 1 mW generated by the TEHS. This requires ultralow duty cycle which complicates MAC layer design because a BSR node must sleep for more than 99.6% of overall operation time. The challenge for MAC layer design is the inability to predict when the BSR node awakens from sleep mode due to unpredictability of the harvested energy. Therefore, a new feasible MAC layer design, GRI- (gateway radio initialized-) MAC, is proposed and analyzed.

[1]  Jing Yang,et al.  Energy Cooperation in Energy Harvesting Communications , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Communications.

[2]  Ignas G. Niemegeers,et al.  A Distributed Smart Application for Solar Powered WSNs , 2012, Networking.

[3]  R. Venkatesha Prasad,et al.  Zero Energy Network stack for Energy Harvested WSNs , 2014, ArXiv.

[4]  Mohammed Ismail,et al.  Characterization of Human Body-Based Thermal and Vibration Energy Harvesting for Wearable Devices , 2014, IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems.

[5]  Abhiman Hande,et al.  Vibration Energy Harvesting for Disaster Asset Monitoring Using Active RFID Tags , 2010, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[6]  Omer Gurewitz,et al.  RI-MAC: a receiver-initiated asynchronous duty cycle MAC protocol for dynamic traffic loads in wireless sensor networks , 2008, SenSys '08.

[7]  Sanjib Kumar Panda,et al.  Energy Harvesting From Hybrid Indoor Ambient Light and Thermal Energy Sources for Enhanced Performance of Wireless Sensor Nodes , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.

[8]  Vladimir Leonov,et al.  Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting of Human Body Heat for Wearable Sensors , 2013, IEEE Sensors Journal.

[9]  Manisha R. Mhetre,et al.  Micro energy harvesting for biomedical applications: A review , 2011, 2011 3rd International Conference on Electronics Computer Technology.

[10]  Roy D. Yates,et al.  Energy Harvesting Receivers: Packet Sampling and Decoding Policies , 2015, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[11]  Olfa Kanoun,et al.  Wireless sensor nodes using energy harvesting and B-Mac protocol , 2013, 10th International Multi-Conferences on Systems, Signals & Devices 2013 (SSD13).

[12]  Amelia Lynn Hodges.  Investigation of antennas and energy harvesting methods for use with a UHF microtransceiver in a biosensor network , 2013 .

[13]  Sennur Ulukus,et al.  Fundamental limits of energy harvesting communications , 2015, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[14]  Steve Warren,et al.  Biomedical sensing and wireless technologies for long duration EVAs and precursor scout missions , 2014, 2014 IEEE Aerospace Conference.

[15]  Ignas G. Niemegeers,et al.  Bond Graph Modeling for Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks , 2012, Computer.

[16]  Germán Sánchez,et al.  Wireless propagation measurements for astronaut body area network , 2013, IEEE International Conference on Wireless for Space and Extreme Environments.

[17]  Jaiyong Lee,et al.  Performance Evaluation of Synchronous and Asynchronous MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks , 2008, 2008 Second International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications (sensorcomm 2008).

[18]  Cesare Alippi,et al.  An Adaptive System for Optimal Solar Energy Harvesting in Wireless Sensor Network Nodes , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers.

[19]  Shuang-Hua Yang,et al.  Thermal energy harvesting for WSNs , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

[20]  Zhigang Li,et al.  RW-MAC: An asynchronous receiver-initiated ultra low power MAC protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks , 2010 .

[21]  Li Xiao,et al.  The Evolution of MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey , 2013, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[22]  Xiaolei Shi,et al.  SyncWUF: An Ultra Low-Power MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[23]  Charles Carlson.  Low-power packet synchronization scheme implemented on field programmable gate array , 2015 .

[24]  Eduard Alarcón,et al.  Energy Buffer Dimensioning Through Energy-Erlangs in Spatio-Temporal-Correlated Energy-Harvesting-Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks , 2014, IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems.

[25]  William B. Kuhn,et al.  Study of Wireless Propagation for Body Area Networks Inside Space Suits , 2014, IEEE Sensors Journal.

[26]  S. K. Panda,et al.  Thermal energy harvesting from human warmth for wireless body area network in medical healthcare system , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Power Electronics and Drive Systems (PEDS).