Energy Performance of High Data Rate and Low Power Transceiver based Wireless Body Area Networks

Emerging Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are receiving increasing interest from researchers and designers. Specific requirements for small-scale dimensions, low-latency, lightweight and limited power capacity mean that the key challenge in WBANs design is in the adoption of energy-efficient strategies for better system performance, and in the efficient use of high data-rate and ultra-low-power transceivers. This paper presents a high-level energy-aware SystemC-based model and simulation of Nordic’s Enhanced ShockBurst (ESB) and ShockBurst (SB) baseband protocol engine. The model includes data from energy consumption experiments using nRF24L01+ transceiver, enabling detailed exploration of energy conversation strategies. With this model, we show that a high data-rate ESB and SB transmission at 2Mbps can save more than 60% and 80% energy respectively, and it has 3x higher lifetime expectancy than the 250Kbps low data-rate communication with a payload collecting strategy.