Multiconstraint-Aware Routing Mechanism for Wireless Body Sensor Networks

Abstract

The merger of wireless sensor technologies, pervasive computing, and biomedical engineering has resulted in the emergence of wireless body sensor network (WBSN). WBSNs assist human beings in various monitoring applications such as health-care, entertainment, rehabilitation systems, and sports. Life-critical health-care applications of WBSNs consider both reliability and delay as major Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. In addition to the common limitations and challenges of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), WBSNs pose distinct constraints due to the behavior and chemistry of the human body. The biomedical sensor nodes (BMSNs) adopt multihop communication while reporting the heterogeneous natured physiological parameters to the nearby base station also called local coordinator. Routing in WBSNs becomes a challenging job due to the necessary QoS considerations, overheated in-body BMSNs, and high and dynamic path loss. To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing routing protocols integrate the aforementioned issues in their designs. In this research work, a multiconstraint-aware routing mechanism (modular-based) is proposed which considers the QoS parameters, dynamic and high path loss, and the overheated nodes issue. Two types of network frameworks, with and without relay/forwarder nodes, are being used. The data packets containing physiological parameters of the human body are categorized into delay-constrained, reliability-constrained, critical (both delay- and reliability-constrained), and nonconstrained data packets. NS-2 is being used to carry out the simulations of the proposed mechanism. The simulation results reveal that the proposed mechanism has improved the QoS-aware routing for WBSNs by adopting the proposed multiconstraint-aware strategy.