Cooperative compressed sensing schemes for telemonitoring of vital signals in WBANs

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are composed of various sensors that either monitor and transmit real time vital signals or act as relays that forward the received data packets to a nearby Body Node Coordinator (BNC). The design of an accurate and energy efficient wireless telemonitoring system can be achieved by: i) minimizing the amount of data that should be transmitted for an accurate reconstruction at the BNC, and ii) increasing the robustness of the telemonitoring system to link failures due to the nature of wireless medium. To this end, we present a novel Compressed Sensing (CS) based telemonitoring scheme, called Cooperative Compressed Sensing (CCS), that exploits the benefits of Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) along with key characteristics of the transmitted biosignals in order to achieve an energy efficient signal reconstruction at the BNC. Simulation studies, carried out with real electrocardiographic (ECG) data, show the benefits of: i) employing RLNC, compared to the case where relays simply store and forward the original data packets, and ii) applying the proposed CCS scheme, compared to traditional CS recovery approaches.