EReM: Energy-Efficient Resource Management in Body Area Networks with Fault Tolerance

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are inherently resource-constrained in nature and each WBAN has different kind of Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. Therefore, in the presence of interference and poor link-quality, the resource pool of WBANs depletes significantly, which inherently increases the data dissemination delay and decreases the QoS requirements of WBANs in terms of resource availability. In order to minimize the data dissemination delay and to provide fair resources to WBANs in a link-failure situation, first we propose a fault tolerant mechanism for WBANs. Thereafter, we propose an energy-efficient resource management process to provide fair amount of resources to WBANs and minimize the energy consumption rate. We formulate the proposed scheme mathematically and evaluate through a series of simulations. Results show that the proposed scheme provides significant improvement in terms of delay, fairness and network throughput.