An Efficient and Reliable Directed Diffusion Routing Protocol in Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are composed of several tiny sensor devices which are embedded on or implanted in the human body. They are designed to continuously transmit sensed physiological data and act as key infrastructures for remote healthcare monitoring and treatment. Considering the limited power supply, varying link connectivity, and complicated channel environment, the design of routing protocol in WBANs is challenging. The existing algorithms cannot fully satisfy the application requirements. Focusing on lower energy consumption, a directional diffusion routing protocol for WBANs is proposed in this paper. The concept of the gradient is introduced to indicate the direction and the rate of data transmission and the minimum hop count in directed diffusion is used as the criterion for establishing the gradient. Each node is required to maintain the gradient information of its neighbor nodes with the shortest path. Simultaneously, the residual energy is also considered to further improve the performance. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol has significantly lower packet loss rate and power consumption in both static and mobile scenarios. The reliability of the data transmission is improved and the networks life is extended effectively.