Energy efficient thermal and power aware (ETPA) routing in Body Area Networks

Research on routing in a network of intelligent, lightweight, micro and nano-technology sensors deployed in or around the body, namely Body Area Network (BAN), has gained great interest in the recent years. In this paper, we present an energy efficient, thermal and power aware routing algorithm for BANs named Energy Efficient Thermal and Power Aware routing (ETPA). ETPA considers a node´s temperature, energy level and received power from adjacent nodes in the cost function calculation. An optimization problem is also defined in order to minimize average temperature rise in the network. Our analysis demonstrates that ETPA can significantly decrease temperature rise and power consumption as well as providing a more efficient usage of the available resources compared to the most efficient routing protocol proposed so far in BANs, namely PRPLC. Also, ETPA has a considerably higher depletion time that guarantees a longer lasting communication among nodes.