A priority based energy harvesting scheme for charging embedded sensor nodes in WBANs

What is it about?

This research work proposes a novel priority aware schedule based charging algorithm that uses wireless power transfer (WPT) technique in order to charge embedded sensor nodes (SNs) in a wireless body area network (WBAN). Implanted sensor nodes in WBANs require energy for both information extraction and data transmission to the remote controller unit. Thus, energy shortage of these SNs deteriorates due to the data transmission process of the patient health monitoring system. However, continuous operation by means of electromagnetic induction for energy harvesting, obtained from ambient sources, reduces the overall efficiency of the primary unit. With this paradigm in sight, an algorithm demonstrating the modeling of a priority-based mechanism is proposed in order to ensure proper sensor voltage level and to reduce the transmission losses. Medium access control (MAC) protocols are used for inductive powering from the primary unit to the secondary unit in a collision-free centralized scheduling scheme. Therefore, the proposed wireless charging algorithm for implanted SNs in WBAN is designed as per carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) technique. Because of this, the overall power consumption of SNs for certain operation periods, successful charging probabilities for multiple SNs, and instantaneous power requirements are considered as key performance measures of analysis. It is assumed that proper energy storage in both transmitters and receivers can handle channel interference and traffic contention. Simulation results verify that a significant reduction in power consumption for the proposed priority aware algorithm will maintain almost similar output. For this reason, saturating class—C as well as class—E driver circuits have been used to justify the performance in two different circuit topologies. Effects of priority with respect to the full charge period have also been observed for the multi-node system. Furthermore, from performance analysis, it has been demonstrated that the scheduling scheme causes both single MOSFET composed saturating class—C and Lchoke modeled class—E associated driver circuits to be considerably more loss efficient than corresponding existing ones.

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Photo by GuerrillaBuzz on Unsplash

Photo by GuerrillaBuzz on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We propose a priority-based wireless power transfer (WPT) scheduling algorithm for efficiently charging sensor nodes in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). This is especially important in medical monitoring applications, where maintaining uninterrupted operation of implanted sensors is critical to patient safety and system performance. Two significant contributions of this work are: a) the development of a collision-free MAC-based charging schedule that leverages CSMA/CA to optimize inductive energy transfer and reduce power loss across multiple implanted sensor nodes, and b) a dual-topology validation using class-C and class-E driver circuits, which demonstrates superior energy efficiency and reduced voltage fluctuation under varying load and priority conditions. These insights offer a practical roadmap for deploying sustainable and adaptive charging frameworks in future body-centric IoT healthcare systems, particularly in environments with constrained energy and high communication demands.

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