Reliability aware routing for intra-wireless body sensor networks

Abstract

With the promise of cost effective, unobtrusive, and unsupervised continuous monitoring, wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) have attracted a wide range of monitoring applications such as medical and healthcare, sport activity, and rehabilitation systems. Most WBSN's medical and healthcare applications are real-time and life-critical, which require strict guarantee of quality of service (QoS), in terms of latency, and reliability. Reliability in routing plays key role in providing the overall reliability in WBSNs. This paper presents reliability aware routing (RAR) for intra-WBSNs that aims to provide high reliability for reliability constraint data packets. It considers the high and dynamic path loss due to body postural movements and temperature rise of the implanted biomedical sensor nodes. We have used two network models in this paper: RAR without Relays (RAR) and RAR with Relays (RARR). The simulation results reveal that RARR outperforms the other state-of-the-art schemes while RAR has slightly low reliability at low data rates as compared to RARR but significantly higher than other state-of-the-art schemes.