Abstract
Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs) constitute a subset of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) responsible for monitoring vital sign-related data of patients and accordingly route this data towards a sink. In routing sensed data towards sinks, WBSNs face some of the same routing challenges as general WSNs, but the unique requirements of WBSNs impose some more constraints that need to be addressed by the routing mechanisms. This paper identifies various issues and challenges in pursuit of effective routing in WBSNs. Furthermore, it provides a detailed literature review of the various existing routing protocols used in the WBSN domain by discussing their strengths and weaknesses.
Highlights
A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) refers to a distributed network, consisting of dispersed and autonomous sensing stations
Different energy efficient and Quality of Service (QoS)-aware routing protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks [40,41,42,43], wireless multimedia sensor networks [44,45,46] and MANETs [47,48], which cannot be directly used for Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs) because of their unique constraints
We argue that the next-hop selection may not optimal in terms of residual energy, as energy consideration is not being made if the geographic information results in a unique solution
Summary
A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) refers to a distributed network, consisting of dispersed and autonomous sensing stations. Since the elderly aged people are more vulnerable to different health issues and diseases, they require frequent medical check-up, which results in high healthcare costs [15,16]. These statistics demand major changes towards proactive management of these issues by focusing on the prevention and early detection and treatment of different diseases [17]. Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs) are a subset of wireless sensor networks, which can offer this paradigm shift and can be used for early detection of the different diseases They can collect and analyze the vital sign-related data of patients by deploying different types of bio-medical sensors (for example: body temperature, heartbeat, blood pressure, electrocardiogram (ECG), electro encephalogram (EEG), etc.
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