Energy aware forwarder selection in wireless body area networks to enhance stability and lifetime
摘要
The emerging Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) open various challenges and opportunities in the healthcare industry for monitoring the patient’s health. In modern healthcare applications, the monitoring is done by placing/implanting heterogeneous intelligent sensing devices on the human body. These devices are limited by power, storage, and computational capability. Two crucial issues of WBAN design are power consumption and reliable data transmission from sensors to the coordinator. Since transmission consumes significant energy, minimizing power depletion of the sensors in the transmission is a prime challenge to enhance the WBAN lifetime and network performance. Over time, various forwarder selection protocols have been proposed to enhance the energy efficiency of the WBAN, but they have several shortcomings. This paper proposes an Energy Aware Forwarder Selection Technique (EAFST), which enhances the stability period and network lifetime of WBAN by selecting efficient forwarder nodes. EAFST organizes the sensors into concentric rings centered at the coordinator. The high-priority sensor directly transmits data to the coordinator and does not relay other’s data. However, EAFST selects a forwarder for low or medium-priority nodes that fall in a lower ring based on residual energy, queue size, and path loss. This significantly reduces the energy burden on high-priority nodes and data transmission delay. Moreover, the forwarder’s role is shuffled among low and medium-priority nodes to minimize energy usage when the residual energy of the forwarder goes below the threshold value. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is validated using extensive simulations, and the results show that EAFST has an improvement of