Adaptive routing for multihop IEEE 802.15.6 Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (BANs) have the ability of gathering and sending on-body measurements to a terminal. Autonomous nodes are deployed on the body to monitor vital signs and environmental parameters. The IEEE 802.15.6 standard mainly specifies physical and medium access for BANs. Routing is discussed as part of the link layer and multihop is not fully considered. Several studies state that multihop for BANs improves the network performance by reducing energy consumption and, thus, extending network lifetime. This work presents the Adaptive Multihop tree-based Routing (AMR) protocol that is extensively evaluated in a real testbed deployment. Fuzzy logic is proposed to evaluate several node and network parameters in order to improve network performance in terms of throughput and energy consumption. Experimental results show that the effective parameter combination when using fuzzy logic is able to extend network lifetime by balancing out energy consumption throughout network nodes.