Equalized energy consumption in wireless body area networks for a prolonged network lifetime

Abstract

The phenomenal advances in electronics contributed to a widespread use of distributed sensors in wireless communications. A set of biosensors can be deployed or implanted in the human body to form a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), where various WBAN PHY layers are utilized. The WBAN allows the measurement of physiological data, which is forwarded by the gateway to the base station for analysis purposes. The main issue in conceiving a WBAN communication mechanism is to manage the residual energy of sensors. The mobile agent system has been widely applied for surveillance applications in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). It consists in dispatching one or more mobile agents simultaneously to collect data, while following a predetermined optimum itinerary. The continuous use of the optimal itinerary leads to a rapid depletion of sensor nodes batteries, which minimizes the network lifetime. This paper presents a new algorithm to equalize the energy consumption among sensor motes. The algorithm exploits all the available paths towards the destination and classifies them with respect to the end-To-end delay and the overall energy consumption. The proposed algorithm performs better compared to the optimal routing path. It increases the network lifetime to the maximum by postponing routing of data via the most-recently used path, and it also maintains data delivery within the delay interval threshold.