SNR based Energy Efficient Communication Protocol for Emergency Applications in WBAN

Continuous remote monitoring of a patient's health condition in dynamic environment imposes many challenges. Challenges further get multiplied based on the size of body area sensor network. One such challenge is energy efficiency of sensors. Maintaining longer life of all nodes, especially who participate in communicating vital signals from one network to another towards the base station is very important. In this work, an energy efficient communication protocol for the wireless body area network (WBAN) is proposed. The essential characteristics of the protocol are: random deployment of nodes, formation of clusters, node with high signal to noise ratio (SNR) as cluster head (CH), random rotation of CHs within each cluster, and so on. The developed algorithm is simulated in MATLAB by varying the number of nodes and networks. Obtained results are compared with some of the recent and most relevant existing works. It is found that there is an enhancement in the network lifetime by 19.5%, throughput by 12.61% and average remaining energy by 57.21%.