An Energy Efficient Protocol for Wireless Body Area Network of Health Sensors

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are a technology with the potential to greatly improve healthcare services by providing long-term remote health monitoring. However, energy efficient protocol must be designed to maximize the operating lifetime of the energy constrained sensor nodes involved. This paper proposes data classification and aggregation protocol which improve the energy efficiency by reducing the energy required to transmit each data measurement. Compared to existing protocol, it is suitable for a range of sensors operating at different sampling rates and different WBAN configurations as aggregation is performed at the sensor level node level. This work also contributes experimentation of the proposed protocol on developed prototype wireless sensor nodes. Through an energy efficiency analysis based on the IEEE 802.15.6 body area network standard, the protocol has shown the potential to provide significant improvements in energy efficiency.