Towards Reliable and Energy-Efficient Communication Protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks in Medical Applications

Wireless body area networks are an attractive technology for measuring health data in medical applications. Several challenges exist in designing and implementing such reliable, energy-efficient communication protocols for these networks. This new strategy solution strategy is based on a hybrid communication protocol that simultaneously obtains the positive aspects of centralized and distributed structures. By centralizing network maintenance and control functions such as health monitoring of nodes and transmission control, the proposed protocol supports reliable data transmission with minimal energy consumption in WBANs. This reduces the overhead and collisions, giving the network better reliability. Unlike other protocols mentioned where the data flow from the sensor node to the central node is at least distributed, in our case, a few nodes send their data at a time to the Central Node. It enables low-power communication since nodes only need to wake up during their allotted transmission time slot. Through simulations, we demonstrate that the new protocol surpasses existing protocols in reliability and energy consumption performance. It can also help to minimize the energy consumption of WBAN nodes, which makes it an appropriate candidate for long-time medical monitoring applications. All in all, this work helps to pave the way for the efficient use of WBANs in a wide range of medical applications that require robustness and low-energy communications.