Temperature and Reliability-Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

The Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) can be envisioned as a cost-effective solution to provide monitoring and reporting services in medical and non-medical applications to improve quality of life. The dissemination of patient data in a timely and reliable manner is one of the necessities of healthcare applications of WBSN. The critical data packets are highly delay-sensitive. However, these packets reaching the destination beyond timelines undermine the benefit of such networks. To provide real-time health monitoring an adequate link (in terms of reliability, stability, and QoS) has to be maintained. However, the distinguishing characteristics of WBSN pose several challenges to be countered such as limited resources, transmission range, and unreliable wireless links in terms of QoS as low-power radios are sensitive to interference and noise. Consequently, some portions of the network experience a significant level of congestion thereby strain the communication links, available bandwidth, insufficient buffer space, increased number of collisions, packet losses, and transmission disruption. Therefore, importing QoS awareness in routing decisions is important to improve the performance of WBSN. This paper proposes a QoS-aware routing protocol named TLD-RP (Temperature, Link-reliable, and Delay-aware Routing Protocol) for WBSN. Most of the temperature-aware routing protocols proposed for the WBSN incorporate either single or composite routing metrics (temperature, hop count, or energy). However, optimized route discovery has been overlooked in most of the previous studies on QoS requirements such as link reliability, stability, and link delay. Keeping in view these limitations, the proposed TLD-RP makes use of a multi-facet composite routing metric by carefully considering the critical QoS requirements for the WBAN. The design of the proposed TLD-RP scheme centers on the link’s reliability, path delay, and link’s asymmetric property. These design factors enable the proposed TLD-RP scheme to make more informed decisions regarding dynamic channel conditions. The optimized links satisfying the QoS requirements are selected for routing data packets. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness and efficacy of the proposed TLD-RP strategy by improving WBSN performance along with throughput, packet delivery, network overhead, and link stability.