Abstract
The rapid growth of the elderly population in the world and the rising cost of healthcare impose big issues for healthcare and medical monitoring. A Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) is comprised of small sensor nodes attached inside, on or around a human body, the main purpose of which is to monitor the functions and surroundings of the human body. However, the heat generated by the node's circuitry and antenna could cause damage to the human tissue. Therefore, in designing a routing protocol for WBSNs, it is important to reduce the heat by incorporating temperature into the routing metric. The main contribution of this paper is to survey existing temperature-aware routing protocols that have been proposed for WBSNs. In this paper, we present a brief overview of WBSNs, review the existing routing protocols comparatively and discuss challenging open issues in the design of routing protocols.
Highlights
According to the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, the elderly population in the world in 2010 was 759 million and projected to be 1,198 million in 2025, or 15% of world population [1]
WBSNS are a wireless network optimized for low power devices and operation on, in or around the human body to serve a variety of applications, including medical, consumer electronics/personal entertainment and others [2]
We focus only on the temperature-aware routing protocols, because temperature rise directly affects human health and safety, as studied in [4,5]
Summary
WBSNs. Since WBSNs are a subset of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), WBSNs inherit the typical challenges and issues of WSNs. WBSNS are a wireless network optimized for low power devices and operation on, in or around the human body (but not limited to humans) to serve a variety of applications, including medical, consumer electronics/personal entertainment and others [2]. WBSNS are a wireless network optimized for low power devices and operation on, in or around the human body (but not limited to humans) to serve a variety of applications, including medical, consumer electronics/personal entertainment and others [2] By this definition, WBSNs can be used in many application areas. We focus only on the temperature-aware routing protocols, because temperature rise directly affects human health and safety, as studied in [4,5].
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