DSCB: Dual sink approach using clustering in body area network

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is a revolutionary achievement in the field of health services. The field is envisioned to play an important role in medical, psychological, and even in non-medical applications. Different routing protocols are being designed in WBAN to enhance its performance, focusing on delay, energy efficiency, throughput, and network lifetime. Line-of-sight (LoS) and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) communications and clustering are the least focused areas in the literature. This paper presents a routing protocol called Dual Sink approach using Clustering in Body Area Network (DSCB) which is more reliable in terms of network stability, and energy efficient in comparison to its counterparts. This protocol enhances network life-time by introducing the concept of clustering while using two sink nodes. The proposed scheme is compared with existing protocols named as SIMPLE and DARE. The cost function is established for selection of forwarder node, based on nodal distance from the sink, residual energy, and transmission power. Simulation results depict that the proposed protocol achieves significant performance improvement in network throughput by attaining 55% and 22% more efficient results compared to SIMPLE and DARE respectively. Furthermore, the results show improved performance of DSCB protocol, in terms of network stability and end-to-end delay performance metrics.