REEC: Reliable Energy Efficient Critical Data Routing in Wireless Body Area Networks

Energy efficient routing is important for increasing the lifetime of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). Uniform load distribution is necessary for reliable and long term monitoring of patients in WBANs. In this paper, we propose Reliable Energy Efficient Critical data routing in WBANs (REEC). We deploy eight nodes and a sink on the human body. Two forwarder nodes are used which reduce the communication distance between nodes and the sink. The nodes send only critical data to the forwarder nodes. In order to distribute the load uniformly, forwarder nodes are selected/rotated in each round. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves increased network lifetime and throughput. Therefore, REEC is useful for reliable health monitoring in WBANs.