Energy Efficient Transmission Strategies for Body Sensor Networks with Energy Harvesting

This paper addresses the problem of developing energy efficient transmission strategies for Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) with energy harvesting. It is assumed that multiple transmission modes that allow a tradeoff between the energy consumption and packet error probability are available to the sensor nodes. Taking into account the energy harvesting capabilities of the nodes, decision policies are developed to determine the transmission mode to use at a given instant of time in order to maximize the quality of coverage. The problem is formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and the performance of the transmission policy thus derived is compared with that of energy balancing as well as aggressive policies. An upper bound on the performance of arbitrary policies, and lower bounds specific to energy balancing and aggressive policies are derived.