A Min-Max multi-commodity flow model for wireless body area networks routing

The increasing use of wireless networks and the constant miniaturization of electrical devices has empowered the development of Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs). The wireless nature of the network and the wide variety of sensors offer numerous new, practical and innovative applications to improve health care and the Quality of Life. WBSNs like any other sensor networks suffer limited energy resources and hence preserving the energy of the nodes is of great importance. Unlike typical sensor networks WBSNs have few and dissimilar sensors. In addition, an extremely low transmit power per node is needed to minimize interference to cope with health concerns and to avoid tissue heating which means that the existing solution for preserving energy in wireless sensor networks might not be efficient in WBSNs. Most of the attention has been given to the energy routing where energy awareness is an essential consideration. In this paper, we propose a Min-Max multi-commodity flow model for WBSNs which allows to prevent sensor node saturation, by imposing an equilibrium use of sensors during the routing process taking into account the specific characteristics of the wireless environment on the human body. The Min-Max objective is transformed to a Min objective by adding a set of constraints to the model. Based on the energy consumption for sending and receiving data and the available residual energy of nodes, the max-min based mathematical programming model is designed to find optimal routing. Simulation results show that the algorithm balances the energy consumption of nodes effectively and maximize the network lifetime.