Power Control for Body Area Networks: Accurate Channel Prediction by Lightweight Deep Learning

Recent advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) are reforming the health care industry by providing higher communication efficiency, lower costs, and higher mobility. Among the many IoT applications, wireless body area networks (BANs) are a remarkable solution caring for a rapidly growing aged population. Predictive transmit power control schemes improve BAN communications' reliability and energy efficiency through long-term optimal radio resources allocation that supports consistent pervasive healthcare services. Here, we propose LSTM-based neural network (NN) prediction methods that provide long-term accurate channel gain prediction of up to 2 s over nonstationary BAN on-body channels. An incremental learning scheme, which enables the LSTM predictor to operate online, is also developed for dynamic scenarios. Our main contribution is a lightweight NN predictor, “LiteLSTM,” that has a compact structure and higher computational efficiency than other variants. We show that LiteLSTM remains functional under an incremental learning scheme, with only marginal performance degradation when implemented on hand-held devices. For optimal power allocation, we develop an interquartile range (IQR)-based power control for our channel prediction. When extensively tested using empirical channel measurements at different sampling rates, our proposed methods outperform the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of prediction accuracy, power consumption, level crossing rate (LCR), and outage probability and duration.