Dynamic Sensor Scheduling for Thermal Management in Biological Wireless Sensor Networks

Yahya Osais, F. Richard Yu and Marc St-Hilaire

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 2013, vol. 9, issue 4, 794920

Abstract: Biological sensors are a very promising technology that will take healthcare to the next level. However, there are obstacles that must be overcome before the full potential of this technology can be realized. One such obstacle is that the heat generated by biological sensors implanted into a human body might damage the tissues around them. Dynamic sensor scheduling is one way to manage and evenly distribute the generated heat. In this paper, the dynamic sensor scheduling problem is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP). Unlike previous works, the temperature increase in the tissues caused by the generated heat is incorporated into the model. The solution of the model gives an optimal policy that when executed will result in the maximum possible network lifetime under a constraint on the maximum temperature level tolerable by the patient's body. In order to obtain the optimal policy in a lesser amount of time, two specific types of states are aggregated to produce a considerably smaller MDP model equivalent to the original one. Numerical and simulation results are presented to show the validity of the model and superiority of the optimal policy produced by it when compared with two policies one of which is specifically designed for biological wireless sensor networks.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1155/2013/794920 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:intdis:v:9:y:2013:i:4:p:794920

DOI: 10.1155/2013/794920

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().