Performance Comparison of WBAN Routing Protocols

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are a small network of sensor nodes that are deployed either inside or outside the human body. Due to the limited transmission range and battery constraint in WBAN, the routing protocols will play a very important role in making the communication between the nodes more effective and also prolonging the lifetime of a WBAN. In the last few years, development and evaluation of the routing protocols in WBAN have been an important and attractive research topic, especially for applications in medical monitoring. The selection of WBAN routing algorithms aims to provide a way of communication that has energy efficiency and is consistent and dependable in real-time applications that involve the heterogeneous type of sensor nodes. A diverse range of new routing protocols that are specifically targeted at this environment have been developed, but the information available on the performance of each protocol and the comparisons between their performances is very little. This paper will provide a quantitative analysis comparing the performance of WBAN routing protocols. In this paper, we will out forth the results of detailed simulations that depict the relative performance of the three most recent routing protocols from the five existing routing categories for WBSN (M-ATTEMPT, CICADA, and PRPLC). Those protocols were chosen since they utilize different routing strategies to improve energy efficiency and other requirements. We briefly mention and explain the design of these protocols to help explain their effects on a network. The protocols were carefully implemented according to their specifications published and based on the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. The comparison is done in an OMNeT++ environment and the results of the simulations show that the M-ATTEMPT protocol provides the network stability period as well as good throughput.