Gateway Node-based Clustering Hierarchy for Improving Energy Efficiency of Wireless Body Area Networks

Nowadays, wireless body area network (WBAN) is an emerging technology. WBAN devices play a vital role in health monitoring and patient observation process. Making WBAN more energy efficient is a major issue. The goal of this study is to design energy efficient WBAN where a gateway node is employed in a routing path among the clusters of a body called gateway node-based clustering hierarchy (GNCH). This protocol provides minimization of energy consumption and ultimately maximizes the lifetime of a WBAN. In this proposed GNCH protocol, the gateway node is responsible for transmitting data from cluster heads (CHs) to the base station. The CHs of the WBAN is selected based on the residual energy of the member nodes of the clusters. That means base station does not involve in the CH selection which reduces the energy consumption of the network. Moreover, in this paper, common node problem of two neighboring clusters has been resolved. The proposed GNCH protocol supports single hop communication inside a cluster that effectively eliminates energy consumption. The GNCH and conventional single and/ multi hop communication scenarios have been simulated. The proposed GNCH protocol provides less energy consumption than the conventional protocol because the size of WBAN is very small.