A Probabilistic Energy-Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is an intelligent wireless network of wearable computing devices, supporting a variety of personalized, advanced and integrated applications in the field of medical, fitness, sports, military and consumer electronics. In WBAN, network longevity is a major challenge due to the limitation in the availability of energy supply in those devices, where routing protocol plays a key role towards making such networks energy efficient. In this paper, we have proposed a probabilistic routing protocol for heterogeneous WBANs, dubbed as probabilistic energy-aware routing protocol (PER), which enables a selective utilization of relay node, in an energy effective manner, to prolong the network lifetime. The delivery predictability of PER is estimated based on the available energy, path loss and traffic congestion of a node. The comparative analysis of our simulation based results also show the prospective consistency of PER, in term of network longevity.