A guide for the selection of routing protocols in WBAN for healthcare applications

Abstract

In the present scenario, the term wireless body area network (WBAN) is becoming an integral part of human day to day life due its wide variety of applications, especially in the field of healthcare systems. To design such a reliable body area network system, there are a number of factors to be considered both in hardware and software levels. One of such factors still developing is the design and the analysis of routing protocols in the network layer. Routing protocols are a set of protocols which can identify and maintain the routes in the network so that the data can be exchanged between the nodes efficiently. Hence, routing protocol plays a vital role in the wireless sensor networks for reliable communication between the sensor nodes. In this paper, different routing protocols for body area networks are surveyed and observed that they are affected by factors like energy, network topology, various quality of services (QoS) in the nodes, node temperature, transmission range of nodes, human posture, etc. An evocative taxonomy of protocols is presented such as cluster-based, cross-layered, postural movement based, QoS aware and temperature-aware routing protocols. From the survey, it is found that the selection of a routing protocol is application dependent. For example, the energy efficient protocols like reinforcement learning based routing with QoS support or wireless autonomous spanning tree protocol can be used for daily health monitoring systems due to its high packet delivery ratio. If the system is for in vivo networks, routing algorithm for network of homogeneous and Id-less biomedical sensor nodes or mobility-supporting adaptive threshold-based Thermal-aware energy-efficient multi-hop protocols are the suitable ones. For critical and emergency cases, where accuracy with little delay is the major concern, the protocols like critical data routing, reliability aware routing, data-centric multi objective QoS-aware routing protocol, etc. can be rightly chosen. This entire survey paper can be used by the researchers as a reference for studying various WBAN routing protocols, especially in the field of medical health care systems.