Characterization of the On-Body Path Loss at 2.45 GHz and Energy Efficient WBAN Design for Dairy Cows

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) provide promising applications in the healthcare monitoring of dairy cows. The characterization of the path loss (PL) between on-body nodes constitutes an important step in the deployment of a WBAN. In this paper, the PL between nodes placed on the body of a dairy cow was determined at 2.45 GHz. Finite-difference time domain simulations with two half-wavelength dipoles placed 20 mm above a cow model were performed using a 3-D electromagnetic solver. Measurements were conducted on a live cow to validate the simulation results. Excellent agreement between measurements and simulations was achieved and the obtained PL values as a function of the transmitter–receiver separation were well fitted by a lognormal PL model with a PL exponent of 3.1 and a PL at reference distance (10 cm) of 44 dB. As an application, the packet error rate (PER) and the energy efficiency of different WBAN topologies for dairy cows (i.e., single-hop, multihop, and cooperative networks) were investigated. The analysis results revealed that exploiting multihop and cooperative communication schemes decrease the PER and increase the optimal payload packet size. The analysis results revealed that exploiting multihop and cooperative communication schemes increase the optimal payload packet size and improve the energy efficiency by 30%.