A Review on Thermal and QoS Aware Routing Protocols for Health Care Applications in WBASN

In today's world, the increasing cost of healthcare and tremendous growth of elderly population introduced a major issue for medical monitoring and healthcare applications. A tiny sensor attached outside/inside the human body in Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) monitors the surrounding environment and function of human body. Meanwhile, the heat dissipated from antenna and sensor node's circuitry and antenna deteriorates human tissue. Thus it is very important to design a routing protocol in WBASN by incorporating the effect of temperature into routing metrics. A WBASN consists of heterogeneous nodes; therefore, the routing protocols must be designed to balance traffic among these sensor nodes. Vital signals of human body require different quality of service for different data types. Thus designing QoS aware routing protocols is a challenging task. In this paper, conventional temperature and QoS aware routing protocols are compared and open issues in routing protocol design are discussed.