RE-ATTEMPT: A New Energy-Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks

Abstract

Modern health care system is one of the most popular Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) applications and a hot area of research subject to present work. In this paper, we present Reliability Enhanced-Adaptive Threshold based Thermal-unaware Energy-efficient Multi-hop ProTocol (RE-ATTEMPT) for WBASNs. The proposed routing protocol uses fixed deployment of wireless sensors (nodes) such that these are placed according to energy levels. Moreover, we use direct communication for the delivery of emergency data and multihop communication for the delivery of normal data. RE-ATTEMPT selects route with minimum hop count to deliver data which downplays the delay factor. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis supported by MATLAB simulations to provide an estimation of path loss, and problem formulation with its solution via linear programming model for network lifetime maximization is also provided. In simulations, we analyze our protocol in terms of network lifetime, packet drops, and throughput. Results show better performance for the proposed protocol as compared to the existing one.