Energy Efficient System-on-chip Design for Wireless Body Area Sensor Network

This article presents a novel energy-efficient on-chip design for wireless body area sensor networks focused towards pervasive healthcare applications. The network adopts a master–slave architecture, where the body-worn slave nodes periodically send sensor readings to a central master node. Unlike traditional peer-to-peer wireless sensor networks, the nodes in this wireless body area sensor networks are not deployed in an ad hoc fashion. The network is centrally managed and all communications are single-hop. A cluster algorithm is also presented so that all slave nodes are within the transmission range of the master nodes. It pretends that all slave nodes can share resources and information over the internet to reduce energy consumption. The design on system-on-chip platform has been simulated for some experiments and implemented. Compared to published and industrially used schemes, the power consumption of the proposed design is over 30 and 99% lower in the simulation and platform implementation, respectively.