An energy-efficient leader election mechanism for wireless body area networks

In Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), the energy consumption determines the lifetime of the entire network. As a result, how to conserve the energy to prolong the network lifetime becomes a key problem in WBANs. In this paper, to address the energy conservation problem in WBANs, we develop an Energy-Efficient Leader Election mechanism, called EELE. In EELE, each node competes for the leader following the distributed leader election algorithm in which a utility function is constructed with the consideration of the residual energy and the location of the node. Moreover, a distance-aware hybrid communication mode is proposed such that a node can choose either direct communication or cooperative communication to alleviate the burden of the leader or the far node. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of EELE mechanism in terms of longer network lifetime, better energy characteristics and higher throughput.