A Survey on Temperature-Aware Routing Protocols in Wireless Body Sensor Networks

Abstract

The rapid growth of the elderly population in the world and the rising cost of healthcare impose big issues for healthcare and medical monitoring. A Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) is comprised of small sensor nodes attached inside, on or around a human body, the main purpose of which is to monitor the functions and surroundings of the human body. However, the heat generated by the node's circuitry and antenna could cause damage to the human tissue. Therefore, in designing a routing protocol for WBSNs, it is important to reduce the heat by incorporating temperature into the routing metric. The main contribution of this paper is to survey existing temperature-aware routing protocols that have been proposed for WBSNs. In this paper, we present a brief overview of WBSNs, review the existing routing protocols comparatively and discuss challenging open issues in the design of routing protocols.

Reliability Aware Routing for Intra-Wireless Body Sensor Networks

“…Different schemes have been proposed to solve the overheating issue of the implanted biomedical sensor nodes and have proposed various routing protocols which are summarized in [3,4,9]. The main focus of thermal-aware routing protocols is to keep the temperature rise of the implanted biomedical sensor nodes under specific threshold by selecting routes that cause less temperature rise either based on individual nodes or entire route.…”

“…Inputs: NDPs and RT or RCDPs and NH (1) for each packet " " ∈ NDPs or RCDPs do (2) if ∈ NDPs then (3) if RT = = NULL then (4) drop the packet immediately (5) else (6) for each node ∈ RT do (7) if PL , > = PL Thre then (8) put node into NH PL (9) end if (10) end for (11) if NH PL = = NULL then (12) drop the packet immediately (13) else (14) for each node ∈ NH PL do (15) put TR of into TRL (16) end for (17) DNH = ∈ NH PL whose TR = = min(TRL) (18) send the packet to DNH (19) end if (20) end if (21) else if ∈ RCDPs then (22) for each node ∈ NH do (23) put TR of into TRL (24) end for (25) DNH = ∈ NH whose TR = = min(TRL) (26) send the packet to DNH (27) end if (28) end for Algorithm 2: Temperature Aware Algorithm.…”

“…The reasons are (1) due to saline-water nature of the human tissues, they absorb the electromagnetic waves during wireless communication and (2) the postural movement of human body [7,8]. Moreover, the antenna radiation absorption during data transmission to the neighbor nodes and the power consumption of the nodes' circuitry may increase the temperature of the in-body biomedical sensor nodes which may damage some tissues if remained for long period of time [3,4,9]. The routing in WBSN has attracted the attention of the researchers due to its characteristics and challenges.…”

“…In coming years the world will face the problem of high increase in elderly population especially in the developed countries living with chronic diseases. This will require huge amount of additional health and medical care cost [2][3][4][5]. These days WBSNs are becoming increasingly popular and have shown great potential in real-time monitoring of the human body and reduce medical and healthcare cost.…”

Medium Access Control (MAC) for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN): Superframe structure, multiple access technique, taxonomy, and challenges

“…Since, the elderly aged people require more medical checkup, as they are more in a life threatening situation of various health diseases [3]. These regular health checkup and monitoring of real time health conditions incur higher cost, which is a challenging problem specifically for lower income and developing countries.…”