Multipath Routing in Wireless Body Area Sensor Network for Healthcare Monitoring

Mobility and low energy consumption are considered the main requirements for wireless body area sensor networks (WBASN) used in healthcare monitoring systems (HMS). In HMS, battery-powered sensor nodes with limited energy are used to obtain vital statistics about the body. Hence, energy-efficient schemes are desired to maintain long-term and steady connectivity of the sensor nodes. A sheer amount of energy is consumed in activities such as idle listening, excessive transmission and reception of control messages, packet collisions and retransmission of packets, and poor path selection, that may lead to more energy consumption. A combination of adaptive scheduling with an energy-efficient protocol can help select an appropriate path at a suitable time to minimize the control overhead, energy consumption, packet collision, and excessive idle listening. This paper proposes a region-based energy-efficient multipath routing (REMR) approach that divides the entire sensor network into clusters with preferably multiple candidates to represent each cluster. The cluster representatives (CRs) route packets through various clusters. For routing, the energy requirement of each route is considered, and the path with minimum energy requirements is selected. Similarly, end-to-end delay, higher throughput, and packet-delivery ratio are considered for packet routing.