Energy aware routing protocol for inter WBANs cooperative Communication

Monitoring systems using Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are becoming more and more popular and widely used to respond to the increasing demand in real time healthcare applications. When operating in group, the WBANed people could form an ad-hoc network remotely monitored via Internet, help each other to relay their data and thus prolong their lifetime. In fact, if a BAN coordinator reaches critical energy level or gets battery depletion or else connection loss, the all WBAN will cope with the data transmission interruption. Fortunately, WBANs cooperation is a promising solution to overcome this issue. In this paper we propose a routing protocol intending to help a group of WBANs to cooperate for relaying packets according to energy and connection issues. The main goal is to provide to WBANs sensors a technique to deliver their data even when the coordinator's battery is very low or depleted or else the connection to the access point is lost or weak while balancing energy consumption between cooperating coordinators. Therefore, the energy threshold technique is used. Simulation results show interesting performances in terms of lifetime about 30% and data delivery about 20% in average.