A Novel Energy-conscious threshold-based dAta Transmission routing protocol for wireless body area network (NEAT)

In today’s age of wireless communication, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) which is an extension of the conventional Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is attracting immense interest in academia as well as industry. This is due to its importance in providing smart heath care service. One of the major research issues are Quality-of-Service (QoS) provision and energy efficiency improvement. Since sensor nodes are highly resource constrained in terms of battery and it is impractical to recharge and replace them, it is imperative to develop techniques/routing protocols or other solutions in other to augment the battery life. For that reason, NEAT routing algorithm which is an improvement on RE-ATTMPT and CEMob protocols is proposed in this paper. NEAT prioritize data into low-emergency, high-emergency and regular-data. Unlike similar protocols, NEAT ignores the communication of regular-data and transmit high-emergency data via direct communication and low-emergency data is compared with the formerly sensed low-emergency data and if it is different, it is transmitted, otherwise it is not transmitted thus leading to significant energy saving. Simulation results obtained by MATLAB prove that NEAT protocol outperforms RE-ATTMPT and CEMob in terms of network lifetime and throughput.