RLTD: A Reliable, Link Quality, Temperature and Delay Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Sensor Networks

Abstract

The miniaturization of biomedical sensor nodes has paved the way for remote patient monitoring using wearable wireless sensor nodes. The network of such invasive and non-invasive sensor nodes is most commonly known as Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN). The healthcare applications of WBSN are delay sensitive and of critical nature, therefore, it require reliable and timely dissemination of patients’ critical data to the remote location to ensure Quality of Service (QoS). However, poor link quality (LQ) may affect QoS and result in higher transmission delay, loss of critical data packets data corruption, packet retransmissions, thereby, degrading network performance and compromising the patient’s privacy and confidentiality. Furthermore, the in-vivo wireless sensor node produces electromagnetic radiations which are absorbed by the human body thereby, causing temperature rise around the implanted sensor node. The prolonged communication of such in-vivo nodes creates a hotspot node that results in sensitive tissue damage. Therefore, ensuring hotspot-free communication is a necessity in WBSN.  Considering such issues, we propose a Reliable, Link Quality and Temperature aware routing protocol (RLTD) for delay-sensitive application of WBSNs that route data through reliable nodes and good quality links to the destination node. The efficacy of the proposed (RLTD) routing protocol is confirmed by comparing results with the well-known thermal-aware protocols for WBSN.