Elsevier

Computer Communications

Volume 165, 1 January 2021, Pages 20-32
Computer Communications

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

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2020.10.017Get rights and content

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.

Introduction

Currently, due to the growth in the aging population and scarce financial resources, traditional health care systems are facing many challenges. According to an estimate of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in the US, National healthcare spending is projected to grow to $3.6 trillion in 2019 and is anticipated to rise in the coming years. In Western countries, elderly and retired parents usually do not live with their children and are admitted to the establishment or Care Centers that provide living quarters and health care for elderly citizens or patients. A system that can continuously monitor the health condition of older people and patients and share information with remote care providers or hospitals are highly demanding. Therefore, scientists and researchers are being motivated to minimize the increasing cost of remote medical health care and patient health monitoring with optimum and affordable solutions.

To catch-up with these trends, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has recently emerged as a new trend and attractive technology to provide such viable healthcare solutions. Technically, WBAN is a group of interconnected, low power, smart, and miniaturized sensor-nodes, which communicate their sensed data through a wireless medium in or around the human/patient body [1]. WBAN is used to measure physical parameters in order to monitor any critical or abnormal conditions in the human body [2]. These parameters include Electro-Cardiograph (ECG), which measures the electrical activity of the heart, Electro-Encephalography (EEG), which measures the electric activity of the brain, and Electromyography (EMG) which measures the electrical activity of body muscles. Subsequently, the collected/aggregated information is transferred to control devices such as Sink or Gateway for further analysis and diagnostics [3].

In principle, WBAN is a subset of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), while WSN is a set of interconnected senor-nodes having the capability of sensing, processing, and communication through a wireless medium (i.e., Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zig-Bee) [4]. In terms of implementation and network architecture, WBAN is classified into two types, i.e., Implanted/In-Body WBAN and Wearable/On-Body WBAN [5]. The former means that implanted bio-sensors or Sink node can transfer information with each other, whereas the latter means the sensor nodes which are placed on the human body, sense vital parameters and transmit this information to the Sink node [6]. Similarly, each sensor in WBAN is broadly classified into three categories, such as physiological, bio-kinetic, and ambient sensors [6]. Physiological sensors measure physical phenomena/attributes such as blood pressure, temperature, and monitoring of glucose, etc. Bio-kinetic sensors can measure acceleration and angular rate of rotation of movement of a human body while the sensors which can measure any environmental conditions, i.e., light, vibration and pressure level, etc. are called ambient sensors [7], as shown in Fig. 1. WBANs have a plethora of applications, ranging from both medical and non-medical applications [8], [9]. Medical applications of WBANs are divided into wearable and implanted medical applications such as Sleep Staging, Asthma, Sports, Battlefield, Diabetes Control, and Cardiovascular Monitoring applications [1]. The Non-Medical applications of WBANs are used in the Entertainment Sector, Consumer Electronics Sector, Off-Body (built into the house), Lifestyle Sector, and in aerospace.

Due to the resource-constrained nature of WBAN (such as limited power supply, memory, bandwidth, and processing capabilities) and wireless communication channels, there are many issues and challenges associated with the design and implementation of WBANs [11]. Issues related to energy-efficiency and reliability are among the most important ones and challenging ones at the same time. It is due to the fact that energy-efficiency and reliability has a great impact on the overall lifetime and stability period of the network and application [3]. In the context of WBAN, reliability implies that the sensitive data may transfer to the sink node in a timely and correct manner while stability period means the total time of network operations till the death/expiry of the first sensor node. Since, in WBAN, sensor nodes are operated on batteries and in many applications’ scenario, recharging or replacing of batteries is almost impossible, it is important to save the battery power on the face of continuous monitoring [11]. There is a need for energy-efficient and reliable routing solutions, which may enhance the stability period and maximize the overall network lifetime so that the aim of implementing a WBAN application is achieved.

In WBAN, energy-efficient and reliable routing protocols are classified into cross-layer, thermal aware, clustered based, delay-tolerant, and quality of service (QoS) based routing [1], [12]. These solutions are either based on a single hop or multi-hop communication inspired by WSNs. Cross-layer routing protocols are considered unsuitable for WBAN because loads are not uniformly distributed among sensor-nodes, which can increase the chances of energy holes [13]. In addition, for tiny resource-constrained sensor-nodes, cross-layer protocols incur excessive computational overhead with increased complexity. On the other hand, thermal-based approaches are widely used for implanted WBAN [13]. However, the detection of hotspot nodes incurs more overhead and consumes high energy in wearable WBAN. Similarly, clustering-based routing approaches proved to be more suitable for WBANs applications as compare to cross-layer and thermal-aware routing approaches [14].

In the existing literature, clustering-based routing approaches are mainly used to increase the energy-efficiency and enhance reliability to achieve longevity in network operations of WBANs’ applications. However, there are still some important issues and challenges that need considerable attention. For instance, in many solutions, energy conservation during the network deployment, network organization, and inter-nodes communication phases have been ignored [11]. Similarly, in [15], the selection criterion of a forwarder node and the optimum number of relay nodes is un-suitable, where the load is not evenly distributed among sensor-nodes. Moreover, a round by round selection of the forwarder node is not optimal in terms of energy consumption, reliability, and maximum throughput in some solutions [16], [17], [18]. To resolve these issues, a new energy-efficient and reliable routing scheme, known as ERRS (Energy Efficient and Reliable Routing Scheme) is proposed in this paper. The proposed ERRS is based on an adaptive static clustering approach that exploits both the advantages of static as well as dynamic clustering to conserve energy and enhance the reliability of WBANs.

Furthermore, ERRS is comprised of 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 to achieve an enhanced stability period and a longer network lifetime. From the architectural and system design standpoint, the overall operations of the proposed ERRS are divided into four phases, i.e., Network Deployment and Initialization, Forwarder Node Selection, Data Transmission, and Load-Balancing. The first three phases are required for the initial operations of data gathering of the deployed application; however, the system turns into a load-balancing phase when several data gathering rounds reach to a pre-defined threshold value.

The contribution of this paper is two-fold, i.e.:

  • First, a novel technique is proposed for the selection of the forwarder node in WBANs to increase energy-efficiency and network stability period.

  • Second, a novel technique is proposed to rotate the role of a forwarder node among the deployed sensor-nodes to ensure even and uniform load-balancing, hence all the sensor-nodes get a chance to become a forwarder node. As a result, the technique reduces energy consumption and extends the network lifetime, thereby enhancing the reliability of WBANs.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 consists of related work proposed in the context of this paper. In Section 3, the proposed ERRS scheme is presented in detail. In Section 4, we discuss simulation results and analysis, while Section 5 gives the conclusion along with future work.

Section snippets

Related work

In this section, we critically analyze the existing solutions summing up their strengths and weaknesses. After the in-depth literature review, we concluded that the energy-efficient and reliable routing solutions for WBAN could be categorized into various classes, i.e., Cross-layer, Thermal aware, Cluster-based, Quality of service, and Delay-tolerant aware routing approaches based on their underlying mechanism and system [12], [19], [20], [21].

In these solutions, Cross-layer routing protocols

The proposed Energy Efficient and Reliable Routing Scheme (ERRS)

In this section, we present our proposed approach, named as an Energy-Efficient and Reliable Routing Scheme (ERRS) for WBAN.

Simulation results and analysis

To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme and compare it with other existing solutions – in our research for implementation – we have used the MATLAB simulator. MATLAB is an easy to use and flexible simulator, having built-in analysis capabilities with a powerful graphical and interactive environment and which is best suited for the evaluation of WBANs protocols and applications [38].

Following are some of the major evaluation and testing targets that we aimed to achieve from our

Conclusion and future work

In this paper, we have proposed a new energy-efficient and reliable routing technique to enhance the stability period in WBAN known as ERRS. ERRS comprised 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 maximizes reliability. Through simulation results based on the MATLAB tool,

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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