Design of an Energy Efficient and Delay Tolerant Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Area Network

The Wireless Body Area Network provide continuous health monitoring and real-time feedback to the medical personnel. The devices used for WBAN have limited energy resources. For most devices it is impossible to recharge or change the batteries. Low power is needed to provide long lifetime to the devices. All devices are equally important and devices are only added when they are needed for an application. The data mostly consists of medical information. Hence, high reliability and low delay is required. Cluster topology and Dynamic Source Routing Protocol provides high packet delivery ratio, low delay and low energy consumption. In this paper, a modification in the DSR routing protocol has been proposed. The modified DSR named as EDSR (Efficient Dynamic Source Routing), reduces the delay by reducing the average end to end delay for the node and reduces the number of packets dropped thereby increasing packet delivery ratio. Energy consumption in EDSR is decreased by 16.73% when compared to DSR. This protocol reduces the energy consumption and delay by reducing the time needed for route discovery process. EDSR achieves high residual battery capacity which eliminates the need for recharging the batteries thereby ensuring long lifetime of the devices. KeywordsWBAN; EDSR; Energy Efficiency; Patient monitoring (key words)