Priority Based Energy Aware (PEA) routing protocol for WBANs

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is a new technology for remote monitoring of patients. Sensor nodes are placed on different parts of the body such as implants and on body to collect data and transfer to the Sink node. Change in body posture, placement of sensors, priority of sensor data and energy consumption makes routing very difficult. Therefore, a Priority based Energy Aware (PEA) routing protocol is proposed in this paper. Child nodes choose a parent node connected to Sink based on a cost function that depends upon priority, residual energy and distance of node. Residual energy facilitates load balancing i.e. selection of different nodes for transmission. Distance helps in successful packet delivery to the parent node and caters for body postures. Priority helps to select a best possible path to forward the critical data keeping in view the energy constraint in WBANs. Comparison of different cost functions with proposed PEA protocol for performance metrics such as network lifetime, throughput and residual energy reveals that the proposed protocol results in increased network lifetime, throughput improvement of around 50% and higher residual energy.