Abstract

Abstract

Title: Ultra Low Energy Communication Protocol for Implantable Wireless Body Sensor Networks.

Fariborz Fereydouni_Forouzandeh, Ph.D.
Concordia University, 2010

Medical science will soon start to benefit from wireless communication and implantable sensor technologies being developed for use in the human body. Such technologies have a potential to revolutionize the health-care industry by providing real-time patient monitoring capabilities to the health-care professionals. In this regard, implantable wireless body sensor networks (IWBSNs) have recently emerged as an important and growing area of research. The implantable sensors are required to be reliable and very small so that the body does not reject them. They must stay functional in the human body for years, and most importantly, they must not be a source of discomfort to the potential patients. The life time of their embedded batteries could vary from a few days to a few weeks using current hardware and software technologies. In order to make such devices suitable for implantation an order of magnitude reduction in energy use is required. Our research is motivated by this goal.
In this thesis, we identify and analyze the sources of energy use in typical devices meant for Implantation in a human body. Our detailed mathematical analysis and computer simulations clearly demonstrate that improving the efficiency of communication protocols is the only realistic way of achieving this goal. Unfortunately, none of the existing low range low energy wireless communication protocols can be used in IWBSNs because of the small energy resources available in the implanted sensor nodes. We propose a new energy aware communication protocol which efficiently encodes data in time domain. It ensures accurate transmission of information. The encoding scheme does this by sending only a single signal from the sensor node to the base station. The protocol is called the Time Based Coded Data protocol or TBCD in short. For proper operation of this protocol reliable synchronization is required. Our proposed synchronization algorithm is energy efficient and stable under worst case conditions as compared to existing algorithms. A sensor node using existing state of the art technology that can only last for a few weeks can be made to last for few years using our proposed communication protocol and the synchronization algorithm.