ROUTING PROTOCOLS IN WBAN: A PERFORMANCE EVALUATION FOR HEALTHCARE APPLICATIONS

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) consists of different heterogeneous nodes located on the surface or inside the human body to serve variety of applications. WBAN is a promising solution in healthcare field. Routing protocols are having a clear effect on the efficiency of WBAN. However, the current routing protocols in Wireless Sensor Network are not applicable for WBAN due to their performance limitations especially in the human body. In this paper, a new routing protocol is proposed for WBAN using weighted average optimization function. It is an enhanced version of Multipath Ring Routing Protocol (MRRP) where a weighted average function is used for determining the next hop node. A performance evaluation for different WBAN routing protocols for healthcare applications is presented. The protocols are evaluated in terms of energy consumption, packet reception rate, end-to-end delay and maximum temperature of sensor nodes. Simulation results showed that, compared to MRRP, the proposed protocol has better delivery rate for data packets.