Energy efficiency and area spectral efficiency tradeoff for coexisting wireless body sensor networks

The coexistence of wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) is a very challenging problem, due to strong interference, which seriously affects energy consumption and spectral reuse. The energy efficiency and spectral efficiency are two key performance evaluation metrics for wireless communication networks. In this paper, the fundamental tradeoff between energy efficiency and area spectral efficiency of WBSNs is first investigated under the Poisson point process (PPP) model and Matern hard-core point process (HCPP) model using stochastic geometry. The circuit power consumption is taken into consideration in energy efficiency calculation. The tradeoff judgement coefficient is developed and is shown to serve as a promising complementary measure. In addition, this paper proposes a new nearest neighbour distance power control strategy to improve energy efficiency. We show that there exists an optimal transmit power highly dependant on the density of WBSNs and the nearest neighbour distance. Some important properties are also addressed in the analysis of coexisting WBSNs based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, such as the impact of intensity nodes distribution, optimal guard zone, and outage probability. Simulation results show that the proposed power control design can reduce the outage probability and enhance energy efficiency. Energy efficiency and area spectral efficiency of the HCPP model are better than those of the PPP model. In addition, the optimal density of WBSNs coexistence is obtained.