Wakeup Scheduling to Increase Lifetime for Wearable Networks

Recent advances in sensing technologies and microelectronics have increased the use of wearable devices to monitor human body functions and its surroundings. A wearable network is an important research topic in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. A typical wearable device has low resources in terms of power and processing capabilities. Reducing the energy consumption is one of the key design factors in a wearable network so that the devices may work for longer duration. Idle listening and overhearing are major causes of energy consumption. In this paper, we aim to address these issues by maximizing the sleeping time of a device (switched off) and avoid unnecessary wakeup time (idle listening) to save energy. We propose an external wakeup scheduling to handle the sleep/wakeup cycle of a device. Our method is able to reduce the idle wakeup time through the use of an out-of-band mechanism. It is found that the proposed method is able to conserve energy and prolong the lifetime.