Reliable routing in Wireless Body Area Network using optimum number of relay nodes for enhancing network lifetime

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is an emerging technology that has the potential to redefine healthcare sector around the world. It can perform proactively by ubiquitously monitoring human health. But its enormous scope is challenged by limited battery power of the sensors, energy and bandwidth. Moreover, the random motion of human beings makes sensor positioning difficult and restricts efficiently routing of critical health parameter values. State of the art protocols do not address the adverse effects of heating of the implanted sensors on human tissues along with energy constraints and interference issues simultaneously. This paper handles all these issues jointly by designing a topology which has an optimized number of relay nodes and then proposes an efficient routing algorithm. Relay nodes are incorporated to frame the backbone of the connected wireless network so that all sensor nodes are coupled with at least one relay node and none of the nodes in the network remain isolated. In the proposed method, the remaining energy of the in-vivo sensors are dissipated intelligently and homogeneously so that network lifetime is enhanced without compromising reliability. Moreover, in our method, multicasting has been used to reduce transmission of unnecessary packets. Our design also leads to minimum hop count from body sensors to the sink node. The effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed approach has been evaluated and analyzed through numerous simulations. The analysis illustrates the efficacy of the proposed solution in terms of delay, network lifetime, energy efficiency, SAR and throughput.