Multi-hop Vital Data Collection with Autonomous Channel Selection from a Large Number of Exercisers

Abstract

Vital data monitoring helps us to scientifically understand health condition and physical ability of exercisers. In this paper, we focus on wireless sensor network (WSN) periodically collecting vital data from sensor nodes attached to a large number of exercisers with multi–hop transmissions. In order to realize reliable data collections in high–mobility environments, a multi–hop access protocol (MAP), which employs time division multiple access (TDMA) based data transmissions with flooding–aided route construction, has been proposed. For increasing the number of supported nodes with the conventional MAP, it is necessary to utilize multi–channel communications, which suppresses the number of operating nodes per channel. However, the reduction of operating nodes at each channel increases the number of isolated nodes that have no neighboring node employing the same channel within their communication ranges. Therefore, this paper proposes autonomous channel selection based MAP (ACS–MAP), which reduces the duration for each node to be in isolated state by introducing autonomous channel selection/switch conducted by isolated nodes. With computer simulations, we investigate the effectiveness of the proposed ACS–MAP.