Cost Efficient Deployment and Reliable Routing Modeling Based Multi-Objective Optimization for Dynamic Wireless Body Sensor Networks Topology

Related Work

A lot of research is being done toward energy efficient routing in ad hoc networks and WSNs (Akkaya 2005; Grosby 2012; Ben Elhadj 2012), the proposed solutions are inadequate for WBSNs. Most protocols for WSNs only consider networks with homogeneous sensors and a many-to-one communication paradigm. In many cases the network is considered as a static one. In contrast, a WBSN has heterogeneous sensors devices with stringent realtime requirements due to the sensor-actuator communication. Specialized protocols for WBSNs are therefore needed. In the following, an overview of some existing routing strategies for WBSNs is given. They can be subdivided into two categories: routing based on the temperature of the body and cluster based protocols.

When considering wireless transmission around and on the body, one of some important issues are radiation absorption and heating effects on the human body. To reduce tissue heating the radio’s transmission power can be limited or traffic control algorithms can be used. In Ren (2006) rate control is used to reduce the bio-effects in a single-hop network. Another possibility is a protocol that balances the communication over the sensor nodes. An example is the Thermal Aware Routing Algorithm (TARA) that routes data away from high temperature areas (hot spots) (Tang 2005) . The node temperatures are converted into graph weights and minimum temperature routes are obtained. A better energy efficiency and a lower temperature rise is obtained, but the protocol has as main disadvantage that a node needs to know the temperature of all nodes in the network. The overhead of obtaining this data was not investigated.