Delay tolerant energy efficient protocol for Inter-BAN communication in Mobile Body Area Networks

Abstract

Body Area Networks (BANs) are used in a range of applications. In these networks, the sensor nodes attached to human body collect data and send it to controller node which in turn sends to a Base Station (BS) located at a remote location. The controller nodes in a BAN can be replaced easily, but when it comes to BANs moving in areas like war, it is hard to replace the batteries frequently. So we need to reduce energy requirement of the nodes to increase the network lifetime. Using mobile sensors is one way to reduce energy and controller nodes can send data to sink easily while performing inter-BAN communication where nodes need to act cooperatively to send data to BS using multi-hop communication. In this paper, we have proposed a new clustering algorithm in which probability of a node to become a Cluster Head (CH) is decided by its geographical location and residual energy of the node. Simulations results show that the proposed protocol is better than the existing EDDEEC protocol regarding the delay, energy efficiency, reliability and network lifetime.