In recent years, interests in the applications of Wireless Body Area Sensor
Network (WBASN) is noticeably developed. WBASN is playing a significant role to
get the real time and precise data with reduced level of energy consumption. It
comprises of tiny, lightweight and energy restricted sensors, placed in/on the
human body, to monitor any ambiguity in body organs and measure various
biomedical parameters. In this study, a protocol named Distance Aware Relaying
Energy-efficient (DARE) to monitor patients in multi-hop Body Area Sensor
Networks (BASNs) is proposed. The protocol operates by investigating the ward
of a hospital comprising of eight patients, under different topologies by
positioning the sink at different locations or making it static or mobile.
Seven sensors are attached to each patient, measuring different parameters of
Electrocardiogram (ECG), pulse rate, heart rate, temperature level, glucose
level, toxins level and motion. To reduce the energy consumption, these sensors
communicate with the sink via an on-body relay, affixed on the chest of each
patient. The body relay possesses higher energy resources as compared to the
body sensors as, they perform aggregation and relaying of data to the sink
node. A comparison is also conducted conducted with another protocol of BAN
named, Mobility-supporting Adaptive Threshold-based Thermal-aware
Energy-efficient Multi-hop ProTocol (M-ATTEMPT). The simulation results show
that, the proposed protocol achieves increased network lifetime and efficiently
reduces the energy consumption, in relative to M-ATTEMPT protocol.Comment: IEEE 8th International Conference on Broadband and Wireless
Computing, Communication and Applications (BWCCA'13), Compiegne, Franc