LAEEBA: Link Aware and Energy Efficient Scheme for Body Area Networks

Wireless sensor networks and, particularly wireless body area networks (WBANs) are the key building blocks of upcoming generation networks. Modern health care system is one of the most popular WBAN application and a hot area of research in subject to present work. In recent years, research has focused on channel modeling, energy conservation and design of efficient medium access control (MAC) schemes. Less attention has been paid to the path-loss performance analysis. In this work, we propose LAEEBA (Link-aware and Energy Efficient scheme for Body Area Networks) which is a reliable, path loss efficient and high throughput routing protocol for WBANs. The characteristics of single-hop and multi-hop communication schemes have been utilized to reduce path-loss effects and increase network lifetime. A cost function is proposed to select the forwarder node on the basis of has high residual energy and minimum distance to sink. Residual energy parameter balances the energy consumption among the sensor nodes while distance parameter ensures successful packet delivery to sink. Simulation results show that LAEEBA protocol maximizes the network stability period and nodes stay alive for longer time, which contributes to sufficient decrease in the path-losses occurring in the links connecting sensors on a human body and hence transferring of data with much less losses. Results show better performance of our proposed protocol as compared to its given variants.