An energy and link aware next node selection protocol for body area networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are designed for sensing the patient vital signs and forward the data to medical doctors or medical centers for further process. The small size intelligent sensor nodes are planted inside or outside the human body for various real-time healthcare and fitness applications. Due to body movement and interference in networks, the data communication has suffered to fulfill the quality of services requirements in terms of in time data delivery and energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an Energy and Link Aware Routing Protocol (ELA-RP) for next hop selection. Proposed protocol calculates the neighbor nodes parameters including energy level and link quality. It further balances the energy consumption and minimizes the data delay and maximizes the data delivery in the network. Extensive simulations experiments were performed to analyze the performance of proposed protocol with existing protocol. Simulation results indicated that proposed protocol has better mechanism to handle data routing and better in terms of energy consumption, data delivery and average delay.