Energy-aware topology design for wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) represent one of the most promising approaches for improving the quality of life, allowing remote patient monitoring and other healthcare applications. In such networks, traffic routing plays an important role together with the positioning of relay nodes, which collect the information from biosensors and send it towards the sinks. This work investigates the optimal design of wireless body area networks by studying the joint data routing and relay positioning problem in a WBAN, in order to increase the network lifetime. To this end, we propose an integer linear programming model which optimizes the number and location of relays to be deployed and the data routing towards the sinks, minimizing both the network installation cost and the energy consumed by wireless sensors and relays. We solve the proposed model in realistic WBAN scenarios, and discuss the effect of different parameters on the characteristics of the planned networks. Numerical results demonstrate that our model can design energy-efficient and cost-effective wireless body area networks in a very short computing time, thus representing an interesting framework for the WBAN planning problem.