Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Ambient Assisted Living Environment

Abstract

Ambient assisted living (AAL) is focused on providing assistance to patients primarily in their natural environment to improve their quality of life. AAL domain has evolved at a fast pace as the stakeholders of AAL include patients and their relatives, social services, and care givers. AAL follows a multi-tier architecture where data from body area sensor network (BAN) gets routed through the coordinator of such networks via cellular devices or display co-ordinators at hospitals to a remote server over the Internet. A BAN configuration comprises of wearable and/or implantable sensors attached to a patient that are connected to a coordinator node carried by the patient. Though many routing protocols are proposed for routing within BAN, the challenges behind routing data from the coordinator of BAN to the cellular devices or display co-ordinators at hospitals is hardly investigated. But this routing is important for establishing end-to-end communication in AAL. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a multi-hop routing protocol that routes data from body sensor networks to the cellular devices or display co-ordinators. In a hospital scenario, there can be multiple display co-ordinators in vicinity of a coordinator of BAN, thus making this routing problem multi-sink one. Moreover, in a hospital, there can be multiple patients having wearable or implantable sensors attached to them forming multiple BAN configurations in vicinity. Thus, packet transmission from BAN coordinator may interfere with the transmission of a neighboring one. The proposed routing protocol is designed to avoid such inter BAN interference. The protocol is simulated using Castalia simulator and results show that the proposed protocol achieves better balance between energy efficiency and throughput as compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.