Power Aware Reliable Lightweight (PARL) Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are evolving as a popular choice for a wide range of monitoring applications that prerequisite reliable network layer operations. However, the resource (such as energy, storage, computational capacity etc.) constrained nodes impose inherent challenges to the design approach. In addition, the communications may take place over multiple mediums based on the type of the communicating nodes and thus the channel conditions have significant impact on the performance as well. Moreover, the link quality may suffer due to relative node movements as a result of posture change. Hence, choosing optimal transmission power that provides a trade-off between reliable data communication and energy draining is another aspect of designing solution. Hence, in this paper a lightweight routing approach is proposed that ensures reliable data delivery to the sink with minimal overhead so that the protocol could be readily implemented in resource constrained networks like WBAN. Transmission power for each data communication is chosen adaptively based on the energy resource and the channel conditions. The protocol has been simulated in Castalia simulator and compared with the state of the art WBAN routing protocol.