Design of Energy Efficient Clustering Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

The research in Wireless Body area Networks (WBAN) has taken an exponential growth in last decade. The advances in wireless communication among the invasive / non-invasive micro sensors along with the Micro Electro Mechanical systems (MEMS) technology have enabled the deployment of wireless body area networks (WBANs) in and around the human body for e-health monitoring. The main aim of WBANs is to improve the speed, accuracy and reliability of communication of sensors inside in the close proximity of the human body. Wearable WBAN in medical applications can be used either for disability assistance or human performance management. In case of wearable BANs, the sensor nodes may be deployed in a wearable device like a brain cap, chest jacket or even a bracelet etc. The sensors sense the body parameters and send it to the base station for further processing. The resource constrained, miniature sized sensors meet several challenges while communicating to the base station. A routing protocol basically decides the energy consumption in the network. So, designing a routing protocol that will extend the life of sensors and hence the life of WBAN is the main goal. This thesis proposes a distributed clustering algorithm that aims to provide a longer network life time by the fair distribution of energy consumption among the sensor nodes.