Distance Aware Relaying Energy-efficient: DARE to Monitor Patients in Multi-hop Body Area Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces DARE, a distance-aware, energy-efficient protocol for multi-hop body area sensor networks that extends network lifetime by optimizing data relaying through on-body relays, especially in hospital patient monitoring scenarios.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel distance-aware relaying protocol, DARE, which improves energy efficiency and network lifetime in WBASN by utilizing on-body relays and evaluating different topologies.

Findings

DARE outperforms M-ATTEMPT in energy consumption.

DARE extends network lifetime in hospital patient monitoring.

Simulation results confirm improved efficiency of DARE.

Abstract

In recent years, interests in the applications of Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) is noticeably developed. WBASN is playing a significant role to get the real time and precise data with reduced level of energy consumption. It comprises of tiny, lightweight and energy restricted sensors, placed in/on the human body, to monitor any ambiguity in body organs and measure various biomedical parameters. In this study, a protocol named Distance Aware Relaying Energy-efficient (DARE) to monitor patients in multi-hop Body Area Sensor Networks (BASNs) is proposed. The protocol operates by investigating the ward of a hospital comprising of eight patients, under different topologies by positioning the sink at different locations or making it static or mobile. Seven sensors are attached to each patient, measuring different parameters of Electrocardiogram (ECG), pulse rate, heart rate, temperature level, glucose level, toxins level and motion. To reduce the energy consumption, these sensors communicate with the sink via an on-body relay, affixed on the chest of each patient. The body relay possesses higher energy resources as compared to the body sensors as, they perform aggregation and relaying of data to the sink node. A comparison is also conducted conducted with another protocol of BAN named, Mobility-supporting Adaptive Threshold-based Thermal-aware Energy-efficient Multi-hop ProTocol (M-ATTEMPT). The simulation results show that, the proposed protocol achieves increased network lifetime and efficiently reduces the energy consumption, in relative to M-ATTEMPT protocol.