Energy harvesting Internet of Things health-based paradigm: Towards outage probability reduction through inter–wireless body area network cooperation

Abstract

In today’s healthcare environment, the Internet of Things technology provides suitability among physicians and patients, as it is valuable in numerous medicinal fields. Wireless body sensor network technologies are essential technologies in the growth of Internet of Things healthcare paradigm, where every patient is monitored utilising small-powered and lightweight sensor nodes. A dual-hop, inter–wireless body sensor network cooperation and an incremental inter–wireless body sensor network cooperation with energy harvesting in the Internet of Things health-based paradigm have been investigated and designed in this work. The three protocols have been named and abbreviated as follows: energy harvesting–based dual-hop cooperation, energy harvesting–based inter–wireless body sensor network cooperation and energy harvesting–based incremental inter–wireless body sensor network cooperation. Outage probabilities for the three designed protocols were investigated and inspected, and mathematical expressions of the outage probabilities were derived. The simulation and numerical results showed that the energy harvesting–based incremental inter–wireless body sensor network cooperation provided superior performance over the energy harvesting–based inter–wireless body sensor network cooperation and energy harvesting–based dual-hop cooperation by 1.38 times and 5.72 times, respectively; while energy harvesting–based inter–wireless body sensor network cooperation achieved better performance over energy harvesting–based dual-hop cooperation by 1.87 times.