A new patient monitoring framework and Energy-aware Peering Routing Protocol (EPR) for Body Area Network communication

The recent research in Body Area Networks (BANs) is focused on making its communication more reliable, energy efficient, secure, and to better utilize system resources. In this paper we propose a novel BAN architecture for indoor hospital environments, and a new mechanism of peer discovery with routing table construction that helps to reduce network traffic load, energy consumption, and improves BAN reliability. The three scenarios with fixed and variable number of packets sent by source nodes are considered for better analysis. Static nodes are considered in first and second scenarios whereas mobile nodes are used in third scenario. We have performed extensive simulations in the OMNeT++ based Castalia-3.2 simulation environment to show that our proposed protocol has better performance in terms of reduced BAN traffic load, increased successful transmission rate, reduced number of packets forwarded by intermediate nodes, no packets dropped due to buffer overflow, and overall lower energy consumption when compared with a similar protocols.