Designing an energy efficient WBAN routing protocol

Advancement of medical science brings together new trend of proactive health care which gives rise to the era of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). A number of issues including energy efficiency, reliability, optimal use of network bandwidth need to be considered for designing any multi-hop communication protocol for WBANs. Energy consumption depends on many factors like amount and frequency of forwarding traffic, node activity, distance from sink etc. Energy consumption gives rise to other issues like heated nodes. Existing routing protocols are mostly single hop or multi-hop, and generally focus on one issue ignoring the others. In this paper, we first identify the sources of energy drain, and then propose a 2-hop cost based energy efficient routing protocol for WBAN that formulates the energy drain of a node due to various reasons and incorporates it in the routing decision. Relative node mobility due to posture change is also considered here. The protocol is simulated in Castalia simulator and compared with state of the art protocols. It is found to outperform state of the art protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio for a given transmission power level. Moreover, only a small number of relays are found to be sufficient to stabilize packet delivery ratio.