Compression schemes for in-body and on-body UWB sensor networks

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in applying wireless sensor networks for health status monitoring both on and within the human body. Low power consumption is crucial in such applications, especially for implanted devices. UWB transmission is one way of making low power transmission possible. A further reduction in power consumption can be achieved through efficient signal compression schemes. Since signals resulting from the measurements of physical phenomena are correlated compression prior to transmission can reduce the bit-rate an thus the power consumption significantly. In this paper a compression schemes for a 2-node sensor network is studied. Differential pulse code modulation is applied for removal of temporal correlation and distributed quantization is used for exploitation of inter-sensor correlation. An example on optimization of encoders and decoders based on the statistical properties of an ECG signal is performed. Significant compression is shown to be achieved at low complexity.