Lifetime Enhancement in Wireless Body Area Networks Using Spare Nodes

Nowadays, it is essential to use Wireless Body Area Network as an efficient technology in healthcare, as it can lead to improved services in mortality prevention and disease control. With the globalization of infectious diseases such as COVID-19, deploying healthcare infrastructures such as hospital beds, emergency centers, Intensive Care Unit (ICU) devices, physicians and other medical supplies has faced many constraints, making it difficult for patients to use these infrastructures and thus increasing mortality rate, as well as disease transmission rate and the globalization of disease transmission. Power and energy constraints of sensors in wireless body sensor networks is one of the main challenges that disrupts the performance and tasks of the network at different times. This paper introduces a method that can increase the lifetime of the network by employing the capacity and power of spare nodes. In this method, spare nodes will be assigned to the main nodes that collaborate with the main nodes in collecting signals and sending them to the sink node. The results of experiments and simulations show that employing spare nodes in order to improve network performance and increase network lifetime can have a significant impact on improving healthcare quality, as well as increasing healthcare period. For instance, the results show that when employing spare nodes for $45 \%$ of the main nodes in the network, the death time of the first node in the network improves by $41 \%$, the death time of the last node in the network improves by $53 \%$, and the number of packets received by the sink node will improve by $52 \%$.