Tracking Service for Mobile Body Sensor Networks Based on Transmission Power Aware Medium Access Control

While the patients in particular hospital or home area are monitored by wireless body sensor networks, tracking service is also very necessary in some cases. This paper is exploring the ability of wireless body sensor to provide localization service. By concerning with the existing transmission power aware MAC protocol, we propose a localization algorithm based on particle filtering. Further, a general message passing framework of transmission power aware medium access control (MAC) is introduced to the tracking service seamlessly. The proposed particle filtering based localization algorithm just picks up the received radio signal strength information from beacons or its neighbors to infer its own pose, which do not require additional hardware or instruments. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments are presented to examine the performance of location estimating method.