A cooperative medical traffic delivery mechanism for multi-hop Body Area Networks

In this paper, we consider cooperative multi-hop wireless Body Area Networks (BANs), connecting sensor nodes to multiple data sinks, referred to as hubs. Each network comprises a set of sensory devices, as well as a data sink, and the coexisting BANs cooperate in order to enable the sensor nodes to have their data traffic delivered to one of the data sinks. To reach a hub, either located in the local- or a nearby network, each sensor should choose a route and communicate with the relay at the tail of the chosen route. We propose a stochastic route selection mechanism, which takes into account the maximum perceived outage probability, maximum queue utilization factor, and the minimum remaining battery power of the relays of each route to determine how probable the route is to be selected to deliver a requesting sensor node´s traffic to a particular hub. The performance of the proposed scheme is assessed through system-level simulations, revealing that the introduced mechanism scales well with the increase of the number of sensor nodes.