Cooperative Body Channel Communications for Energy-Efficient Internet of Bodies

The Internet of Bodies (IoB) is a network formed by wearable, implantable, ingestible, and injectable smart devices to collect physiological, behavioral, structural information from the human body. Thus, IoB technology can revolutionize quality life using these context-rich data in myriad smart-health applications. Radio frequency (RF) transceivers have been typically preferred due their availability maturity. However, for most RF standards (e.g., Bluetooth low energy), highly radiative omnidirectional propagation (even at lowest settings) reaches tens meters coverage, thereby reducing energy efficiency, causing interference co-existence issues, raising privacy security concerns. On other hand, body channel communication (BCC) confines low-power low-frequency (10 kHz–100 MHz) signals body, leading more secure efficient communications. Since efficiency one critical design parameters networks, this article focuses on energy-efficient orthogonal access (OBA) non-OBA (NOBA) schemes with without cooperation. To aim, three main BCC topologies are presented: 1) point-to-point channel; 2) medium 3) broadcast channel. These then used as building blocks create networks relying OBA NOBA downlink (DL) uplink (UL) traffic. For all traffic directions, optimal transmit power phase time allocations derived closed-form, which essential reduce consumption eliminating computational power. closed-form expressions further leveraged obtain maximum size function rate requirement, bandwidth, hardware parameters.