Optimal Routing in Sensor Networks for In-home Health Monitoring with Multi-factor Considerations

Recent technological advances in wireless sensor networking have opened up new opportunities in healthcare systems. Future medical systems are expected to benefit the most in such areas as in-home assistance, smart nursing homes, and clinical trial. However the network system including body sensor networks and environmental sensor networks are normally comprised of energy constrained nodes. Furthermore, communication interference between multi mode nodes in such a dynamic system is also a challenge. This limitation has led to the crucial need for energy and mobility aware protocols to produce an efficient network. In this paper, we propose an energy and mobility aware multipath routing scheme for sensor networks in a smart homecare application. The remaining battery capacity, distance to the gateway, mobility and queue size of candidate sensor nodes in the local communication range are taken into consideration for next hop relay node selection, and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is applied for decision making. Simulation results show that this scheme can extend the network lifetime and reduce the packet loss rate and link failure rate since the mobility and buffer capacity is considered.