Reliable Routing Using Heterogeneity in Wireless Sensor Networks

Health care monitoring using wireless sensor networks is limited by energy, low bandwidth and small memory storage. In this kind of networks, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) is often too low, so it is a challenge to support transmission reliability. In heath care context, heterogeneous nodes are generally used. This paper presents a new approach to improve the transmission reliability with a new multicast routing protocol (HMR) which uses this heterogeneity. This approach exploits some powerful nodes instead of all nodes to forward packets avoiding the loss of packets and reducing the overhead. Simulation results show that this approach could be an interesting solution both in BAN (Body Area Network) and PAN (Personal Area Network).