Energy Efficient Communication among Wearable Devices using Optimized Motion Detection When a person is performing daily activities (e.g. walking) in the context of a WBAN application, the channel quality between the worn sensor devices and the hub can vary due to the switching of LineOfSight (LOS) and NoneLineOfSight (NLOS) statuses among the sender and the receiver. Therefore, motion aware wireless MAC protocols are designed in order to enhance communication reliability and to avoid wasting energy on unnecessary wireless retransmissions during most of the NLOS communications. Despite its importance, the prerequisite step of accurate and energy efficient motion detection remains as an assumption in most of the existing motion aware WBAN protocols. Hence in this paper, we propose an optimized realtime gesture detection method and implement it in a motion aware WBAN communication protocol. Wireless communications only take place when the channel condition is good, while data is buffered otherwise. It is lightweight and tailored to perform fast with accurate detection that suits embedded devices with limited memory size and relatively low MCU processing speeds. Experiments are conducted using both simulation and reallife hardware devices with 6 volunteers. The proposed motion detection method showed 99.28% offline accuracy and 92.5% online accuracy, respectively. Thanks to which, the communication results yielded a promising 82% improvement in packet drop reduction and 32.8% improvement in energy efficiency compared to conventional methods.

Power Aware Reliable Lightweight (PARL) Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are evolving as a popular choice for a wide range of monitoring applications that prerequisite reliable network layer operations. However, the resource (such as energy, storage, computational capacity etc.) constrained nodes impose inherent challenges to the design approach. In addition, the communications may take place over multiple mediums based on the type of the communicating nodes and thus the channel conditions have significant impact on the performance as well. Moreover, the link quality may suffer due to relative node movements as a result of posture change. Hence, choosing optimal transmission power that provides a tradeoff between reliable data communication and energy draining is another aspect of designing solution. Hence, in this paper a lightweight routing approach is proposed that ensures reliable data delivery to the sink with minimal overhead so that the protocol could be readily implemented in resource constrained networks like WBAN. Transmission power for each data communication is chosen adaptively based on the energy resource and the channel conditions. The protocol has been simulated in Castalia simulator and compared with the state of the art WBAN routing protocol.