An Accelerometer-Assisted Power Management for Wearable Sensor Systems

• Woosik Lee,
• Byoung-Dai Lee,
• Namgi Kim,

Vol. 9, No. 1, January 30, 2015
10.3837/tiis.2015.01.019, Download Paper (Free):

• Sensors
• transmission power control
• Power management
• Wearable Devices

Abstract

In wearable sensor systems (WSSs), sensor nodes are deployed around human body parts such as the arms, the legs, the stomach, and the back. These sensors have limited lifetimes because they are battery-operated. Thus, transmission power control (TPC) is needed to save the energy of sensor nodes. The TPC should control the transmission power level (TPL) of sensor nodes based on current channel conditions. However, previous TPC algorithms did not precisely estimate the channel conditions. Therefore, we propose a new TPC algorithm that uses an accelerometer to directly measure the current channel condition. Based on the directly measured channel condition, the proposed algorithm adaptively adjusts the transmission interval of control packets for updating TPL. The proposed algorithm is efficient because the power consumption of the accelerometer is much lower than that of control packet transmissions. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we implemented the proposed algorithm in real sensor devices and compared its performance against diverse TPC algorithms. Through the experimental results, we proved that the proposed TPC algorithm outperformed other TPC algorithms in all channel environments.

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