An Energy Efficient and Reliable Routing Scheme to enhance the stability period in Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a wireless network of wearable sensing and computing devices connected through a wireless communication channel, thereby offering a plethora of enticing applications in the area of remote health monitoring, sports, and entertainment. However, WBANs nodes are highly resource-constrained; therefore, energy-efficient and reliable data transmission is very vital in the design and implementation of most of its applications. Furthermore, on time and accurate data delivery with minimum delay is also highly required. Over time, numerous energy-efficient routing solutions have been proposed for WBANs; however, the significant feature of reliability in these solutions has not been adequately addressed. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new Energy-Efficient and Reliable Routing Scheme (ERRS) to enhance the stability period and reliability for resource-constrained WBAN. ERRS comprises two novel solutions, namely, the Forwarder Node Selection and Forwarder Node Rotation techniques. The proposed ERRS takes advantage of the adaptive static clustering routing technique and achieves enhanced stability period and longer network lifetime, ultimately maximizing reliability. Through extensive simulation-based evaluation using MATLAB, ERRS showed an improvement of 26% over the benchmark protocol in terms of network stability and throughput. Whereas the end-to-end delay of the proposed ERRS is improved by 17% and 40% than by SIMPLE and M-ATTEMPT protocols, respectively, which proves ERRS to be an efficient and reliable routing solution for WBANs.