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