Energy efficient routing protocol for ambient assisted living environment with multiple sinks

In the last few years Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) has come up a long way with numerous innovative ideas to cater to the growing elderly population of the society. With a perfect combination of tools and technology leading to ubiquitous or pervasive computing, data can be sensed, and transmitted from patients at home to healthcare professionals for quick monitoring and taking necessary actions, if needed. Existing routing protocols have been successfully implemented using single sink WBAN. In order to ensure proper communication between patients and their caregivers, in this paper we focus on a multi-sink approach that can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of AAL to a greater extent. The routing protocol proposed in this work always chooses the most suitable sink (single hop) or a forwarder (multi hop) despite relative node mobility thus providing an improved architecture for AAL. The protocol is simulated. Results show that the proposed protocol achieves better energy efficiency. When compared with state-of-the art protocols, it gives better throughput in terms of number of received packets.