Performance Evaluation of Dynamic HUB Selection Algorithm for WBAN

Lightweight and low power sensor nodes designed for wireless body area networks (WBANs) are of great importance for being widespread e-health services. IEEE 802.15.6 standard is a new standard defined for the WBANs architecture. The purpose of this standard is to define specific standards for the physical and data link layers of various applications with different service quality requirements. In this study, the default energy consumption approach for the coordinator node of IEEE 802.15.6 standard is tackled, and as a result, a new algorithm is developed for energy consumption. In the traditional approach, the coordinator node is fixed for WBAN architecture. With the proposed algorithm the coordinator node is dynamically selected. This algorithm called dynamic HUB (or coordinator) selection (DHS) is performed with Riverbed Modeler simulation software with sample scenarios and the performance results are examined. Consequently, the coordinator node energy consumption level is reduced and the network lifetime of the architecture is extended significantly.