Energy-aware routing protocols in wireless body area networks

In today´s world, wireless sensor networks have become a very important and essential tool to solve many issues in human life. One of the issues is related to the healthcare and medical monitoring. Fortunately, as a subset of wireless sensor networks, wireless body area networks (WBANs) have been designed and developed to monitor the functions and surroundings of the human body. However, the sensor nodes used in WBANs are usually small in size and energy constrained, which means that the routing protocols designed for WBANs must consider the energy efficiency as one of design objectives. The main contribution of this paper is to review and discuss energy-aware routing protocols that have been proposed so far for WBANs. In this paper, we introduce the issues in the design of energy-aware routing protocols in WBANs and review the existing protocols. The comparative discussion of the protocols and their perspectives are also covered.