Energy Efficient Communication in Ambient Assisted Living

Recent advancements in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) have produced innovative ways to address the needs of people with impairments and elderly improving their quality of life at the stage when it is most desirable. A typical AAL system consists of ubiquitous computing, sensing and communication blocks where wireless ad hoc, body area and sensor networks play a vital role to facilitate the transmission of sensed data from physiological and ambient sensors to the health-care professionals or monitoring facilities. While the end-to-end communication architecture in a typical AAL system remains heterogeneous, the key functional blocks of wireless body area and sensor network impose significant challenges concerning reliability, efficient use of spectrum and energy efficiency. This chapter focuses on an important challenge concerning energy efficient communication in a multi-tier AAL system. Following a thorough analysis of energy efficiency requirements for communication architectures and protocols in AAL, we provide recent research outputs highlighting the design and development of a multi-tier communication protocol. The proposed communication protocol focuses on inter-Body Area Network (BAN) communication.