AbstractsMedical & Health Science

The rationale for a telemedicine system is the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for the remote transmission of biomedical data and the remote control of biomedical equipment, in order to improve the provided health service. The integration of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) in telemedicine systems does not only achieve significant improvements in the patient’s healthcare, but also enhances their quality of life. However, the potential benefits provided by these networks are limited by the energy constraints imposed when traditional batteries are used as the power source, since the replacement or recharging of these is not always an easy task. To that end, harvesting energy from the human environment can be a promising solution to the aforementioned problems. In this context, it is important to design efficient energy-aware medium access and resource management schemes to exploit the benefits of energy harvesting while guaranteeing the Quality of Service (QoS) in the network. This dissertation provides a contribution to the design and evaluation of novel solutions focused on energy-aware resource management for WBANs powered by human energy harvesting. In particular, our proposals are oriented to solve the problems caused by the differences in energy levels experienced by nodes due to their power supply by energy harvesting. The main thesis contributions are divided into two parts. The first part presents HEH-BMAC, an energy-aware hybrid-polling Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for WBANs powered by human energy harvesting. HEH-BMAC is designed to provide medium access taking into account the capabilities of each node with respect to their energy profile. HEH-BMAC combines two types of access mechanisms, i.e., reserved polling access and probabilistic random access, in order to adapt the network operation to the types of human energy harvesting sources. The HEH-BMAC performance in terms of normalized throughput and energy efficiency is assessed by means of extensive computer-based simulations, revealing a good adaptation to potential changes in the energy harvesting rate, packet inter-arrival time and network size. HEH-BMAC has been proven to outperform IEEE 802.15.6 Standard for WBANs in terms of normalized throughput and energy efficiency, as the number of nodes increases under the same conditions of energy harvesting. The second part of the thesis is dedicated to the design and evaluation of PEH-QoS, a Power-QoS control scheme for body nodes powered by energy harvesting. PEH-QoS is designed to use efficiently the harvested energy and ensure that all transmitted packets are useful in a medical context, hence substantially improving the offered QoS. The obtained results show that this scheme efficiently manages the data queue, thus improving the node operation and optimizing the data transmission, and also provides QoS, while maintaining the node in energy neutral operation state.; 1. Introducción La razón de ser de un sistema de telemedicina es utilizar las tecnologías de la…