EN-NEAT: Enhanced Energy Efficient Threshold-Based Emergency Data Transmission Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Area Network

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a network composed of tiny sensor nodes that can be placed on/in/around the body to measure physiological parameters in real time and transmit it through the Internet to a caregiver. The main aim of WBAN is to improve the overall quality of life. However, limited battery life is a major constraint especially for in vivo sensors since replacing and recharging the battery are not always feasible. Hence, EN-NEAT (ENhanced eNergy-efficient threshold based Emergency dAta Transmission) protocol is proposed in this work which is energy efficient, reliable and has high throughput. Furthermore, EN-NEAT utilizes multi-hop communication to reduce energy depletion and maximizes network longevity by: Firstly, avoiding the transmission of normal data. Secondly, comparing the sensed information, and if there is a variation, a transmission occurs, otherwise no transmission occurs. Lastly, a minimum cost function was proposed to carefully choose parent or forwarder node that has the highest residual energy and the shortest distance to sink. In addition, we model our proposed protocol mathematically using linear programming for the maximization of network lifetime, minimization of continuous data transmission and minimization of end-to-end delay. Our MATLAB simulation results prove that EN-NEAT protocol outperforms the compared routing protocols.