Interference-aware Energy Efficient Transmission Protocol (IEETP) for WBANs

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are increasingly popular in recent years due to their impending use in emergency environments such as in battle fields, disasters, monitoring of human health applications. To achieve the objective of health care, the sensors are placed on or inside of human body. Implanted sensor nodes need to perform for long time without any replacement of battery. To avoid frequent change/replacement of battery, energy management is used and it is a major concern in WBANs. Energy consumption is the most challenging task in these networks, which ultimately enhance the lifetime and efficiency of the network and facts shows that most of the sensor networks use multi hop routing between source and sink node because multi-hoping utilizes the resources economically. Energy efficient routing protocols play a significant role in reducing energy consumption of sensor nodes. Due to the number of sensor nodes attached to patient body, interference among sensors is one of the major causes of energy wastage while transmitting signs of body to the network coordinator. The co-channel interference increases energy consumption of successful transmission, because of the higher number of retransmission efforts required for successful transmission in the presence of interference. The main objective of this work is to develop Interference Aware Energy Efficient Transmission Protocol (IEETP) by utilizing the most appropriate routing metrics. Proposed protocol selects the next forwarder node based on residual energy of nodes, distance, node's position and node density. Proposed protocol is a multi-hop protocol in which each source node forwards the data towards body node coordinator.