Abstract

Background and Objective: In this paper, a new energy efficient, reliable routing protocol is proposed for heterogeneous Body Area Networks (BANs).

Methods: In this proposed protocol, the patient-disease specific sensitive data is sent to the base station by using direct communication whereas the normal data is sent using Multi-hop communication. The intermediate nodes are selected for multi-hop communication based on distance, residual energy, failure probability and communication count parameters. Every time a node is added to the path it is refrained from getting added as next hop for the next communication round hence reducing the load on fixed nodes that come along the path in multi-hop routing. Thus, every time communication occurs a new path is formed for sending the normal data. The proposed protocol is analyzed in terms of residual energy, throughput, network lifetime and node level energy. In the existing ATTEMPT, SIMPLE, iMsimple protocols, the network survived only for 7459, 7568, 7264 rounds respectively whereas in the proposed protocol it survived up to 7443 communication rounds.

Results and Discussion: The overall packet communication is also improved from 9066, 28008, 30673 packets for ATTEMPT, SIMPLE, and iM-SIMPLE to 41029 packets for the proposed protocol.

Conclusion: The proposed protocol outperformed the existing ATTEMPT, SIMPLE and iM-Simple protocols in terms of performance and reliability parameters.

Keywords: Body area networks, routing, energy efficiency, reliability, heterogeneous, multi-hop.

Graphical Abstract