CAPCoS: Context-aware PAN coordinator selection for health monitoring of soldiers in battlefield

This paper presents a context-aware Personal Area Network (PAN) coordinator selection algorithm - CAPCoS, for real-time acquisition of physiological data of soldiers in battle-field. PAN coordinator selection procedure in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), must have some WBAN specific attributes and scenario specific attributes. In this work, we consider three criteria such as - successful delivery of data packets at sink, cooperation among different hops during multi-hop routing, and health severity of individual soldiers. CAPCoS uses the concept of absorbing Markov chain in order to quantify the rate of successful delivery of packets or the Absorption Rate (AR) of each hop. The cooperation Index (CI) represents the ratio of data-out to data-in, for each hop. Priority of Health (PH) represents the normalized health severity of each soldier. In order to select the most preferable Local Processing Unit (LPU) as the PAN coordinator among all WBAN-equipped soldiers, we employ the concept of Analytical Hierarchy Processing (AHP), which generates a proper ranking of the LPUs, based on the aforementioned three criteria. We achieve around 50% improvement in both network lifetime and traffic using the proposed algorithm.