Research On Routing Protocols For Wireless Body Area Network

Recently, more and more sensor network research is carried out in the area of remote and mobile health systems (mHealth) or Telemedicine applications. In these applications the sensors are centered in or on the proximity of the human body thereby forming a network called Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) that is uniquely important for consideration. Some examples of the medical health monitoring sensors are electrocardiography sensor (ECG), electroencephalography sensor (EEG) electromyography sensor (EMG), motion sensors, blood pressure sensors, accelerometer used to recognize and monitor body posture, Blood glucose sensor, temperature sensor, carbon dioxide gas sensor etc. These sensors are heterogeneous in function and depending on the health issue under observation the number of sensor nodes in a single body varies. Communication between these sensors and the gateway can be in a star topology, or cluster. Compared with existing technologies such as WLANs, body area networks (BAN) enable wireless communications in or around a human body by means of sophisticated pervasive wireless computing devices. The general architecture of a BAN-based health monitoring system consists of the body sensors, which sends data to a nearby personal server (PS) devices e.g. PDA then through a Bluetooth/WLAN connection to a remote medical doctor’s site for real-time diagnosis or medical data base or to the corresponding equipment that issues an emergency alert. Hot problems currently researched in this network include reliability and energy efficiency of routing protocols. Reliability is very important because of the critical nature of the data mostly which carries medical health information and must not be compromised and energy efficiency because the sensors battery life are usually very difficult to maintain especially for in-body implants. In this paper we present the analysis of three prominent routing protocols AODV, DSR and DSDV, based on the key characteristics of the WBAN using IEEE802.15.4MAC Protocol for the intra-BAN communication. While Bluetooth is popular in wireless protocols for short range communications, BANs need protocols that support mesh networks, low-latency communications and support for security and low power duty cycling. In this experiment, packet delivery ratio and average end-end delay were used as the measure for assessing the data packets reliability and energy savings efficiency across the network, while still considering the mobility of the nodes, network communication range and the number of nodes. Based on the experimental analysis, both AODV and DSR protocols have good reliability, while DSDV performed very poorly with over90percent packet losses largely due to its high routing table overhead. Furthermore, in energy savings efficiency, DSR and AODV had similar performance while DSDV performed a little poorer. Finally, I propose priority based routing for AODV which will use predefined preference tags to improve the quality of service especially in life-emergency critical situations and guaranteed packet delivery during poor network performance.