Improving energy efficiency of incremental relay based cooperative communications in wireless body area networks

SUMMARY In this paper, we investigate the energy efficiency of an incremental relay based cooperative communication scheme in wireless body area networks (WBANs). We derive analytical expressions for the energy efficiency of direct and cooperative communication schemes taking into account the effect of packet error rate. The following communication scenarios specific to a WBAN are considered: (i) in‐body communication between an implant sensor node and the gateway, and (ii) on‐body communication between a body surface node and the gateway with line‐of‐sight (LOS) and non‐LOS channels. The results reveal a threshold behavior that separates regions where direct transmission is better from regions where incremental relay cooperation is more useful in terms of energy efficiency. It is observed that, compared with direct communication, incremental relay based cooperative communication schemes improves the energy efficiency significantly. Further, cooperation extends the source‐to‐destination hop length over, which energy efficient communication can be achieved as compared with direct communication. We also observe that, for both direct as well as cooperative transmission schemes in error prone channels, an optimal packet size exists that result in maximum energy efficiency. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.