Simplified Energy-Balanced Alternative-Aware Routing Algorithm for Wireless Body Area Networks

Nowadays, the needs of healthcare for the elderly are growing rapidly. To provide continuous all-day medical monitoring and diagnoses at low cost, wireless body area networks (WBANs) have become a forward-looking technology since it is regarded as a potential solution for the remote collecting of physical and symptoms information. Because of its application characteristics, reliability and delay are the most important, as the energy consumption also needs to be considered. However, due to the limitation of the large propagation loss and the complicated channel conditions, the existing routing algorithms cannot completely address the above problems. To balance the node energy consumption and reduce the transmission delay, a simplified energy-balanced alternative-aware routing algorithm (SEAR) for WBANs is proposed in this paper. The residual energy and the current load of a candidate of the next hop destination are considered during the routing request forwarding procedures. The required information is exchanged during the improved routing request and routing request response procedures, and the routing cost is modified accordingly. To improve the compatibility and robustness, the added path is introduced as an alternative path in our algorithm. The simulation results show that SEAR achieves significantly higher network residual energy and network throughput, and end-to-end delay is also reduced. Therefore, the lifetime of the network is extended effectively.