A Relay Based Routing Protocol for Wireless In-Body Sensor Networks

Abstract

Efficient energy utilization of in-body sensors is one of the hot areas of current research. In this paper, we present a relay based routing protocol for in vivo wireless body area sensor networks. Firstly, we decrease the communication distance of in-body sensors to its minimum value. Secondly, we do not allow multi-hopping of data among in-body sensors. So, in our proposed protocol, relays along with one coordinator are deployed on the clothes of a patient. As placed on the patients clothes, relays could easily be recharged and replaced. In-body sensors send the sensed data to nearby relay, which forwards the data to the coordinator and finally to the end station. Moreover, the proposed protocol is provided with linear programming based mathematical models for network lifetime maximization and end-to-end-delay minimization. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol performs better than the selected routing protocols in terms of energy efficiency.