A study on routing protocols in wireless body area networks and its suitability for m-Health applications

Wireless sensor networks are spatially distributed network of autonomous nodes that are used in the monitoring of physical and environmental conditions. Since these sensors have limited energy to work with, their storage and processing capabilities are very much basic. They also have very limited transmission range. Recent approaches have seen immense investments using WSN that demands sensor networks that are capable of operating more efficiently but simultaneously with improved functionality. One such field that require state of art WSN technology is the m-health applications. Some of the factors that are needed to be considered are data consistency, security and sensor validation. Continuous efforts have been taken to improve the system architecture of the sensors that constitute these networks. It has been widely accepted that data forwarding and processing functionality provides ample of opportunity to improve the productiveness of the WSN. Designing routing protocols that comply with the limitations and further efficiently utilize the resources are of huge demand. There has been numerous proposed routing protocols that are based upon various factors like location, data, QoS, etc. This paper studies the various routing protocols that are present for wireless sensor networks with the view of analyzing the advantages and drawbacks in each of them. The study outlines the situations and scenarios by effectively analyzing the faults in those algorithms and establishes good practices that need to be followed in the implementation of the updated protocols which eliminates arising drawbacks. The eventual aim of this study is to layout the base containing all the regulated positive approaches from the established routing protocols and arriving at a more innovative routing protocol that satisfies m-Health's required critical factors such as consistency and accuracy.