Affiliations 

  • 1 School of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru 81300, Malaysia. anwar.muhammad@ieee.org
  • 2 School of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru 81300, Malaysia. hanan@utm.my
  • 3 College of Applied Studies and Community Services, King Saud University, Riyadh 11564, Saudi Arabia. aaltameem@ksu.edu.sa
  • 4 Department of Computer Science, Bahria University Islamabad, Islamabad 44000, Pakistan. knaseer.buic@bahria.edu.pk
  • 5 School of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru 81300, Malaysia. farhan.contact@gmail.com
  • 6 School of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru 81300, Malaysia. muhammad.faheem@agu.edu.tr
  • 7 Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE2 1HL, UK. yue.cao@northumbria.ac.uk
  • 8 School of Engineering, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester M15GD, UK. r.kharel@mmu.ac.uk
Sensors (Basel), 2018 Sep 26;18(10).
PMID: 30261628 DOI: 10.3390/s18103237

Abstract

Recent technological advancement in wireless communication has led to the invention of wireless body area networks (WBANs), a cutting-edge technology in healthcare applications. WBANs interconnect with intelligent and miniaturized biomedical sensor nodes placed on human body to an unattended monitoring of physiological parameters of the patient. These sensors are equipped with limited resources in terms of computation, storage, and battery power. The data communication in WBANs is a resource hungry process, especially in terms of energy. One of the most significant challenges in this network is to design energy efficient next-hop node selection framework. Therefore, this paper presents a green communication framework focusing on an energy aware link efficient routing approach for WBANs (ELR-W). Firstly, a link efficiency-oriented network model is presented considering beaconing information and network initialization process. Secondly, a path cost calculation model is derived focusing on energy aware link efficiency. A complete operational framework ELR-W is developed considering energy aware next-hop link selection by utilizing the network and path cost model. The comparative performance evaluation attests the energy-oriented benefit of the proposed framework as compared to the state-of-the-art techniques. It reveals a significant enhancement in body area networking in terms of various energy-oriented metrics under medical environments.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.