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RESEARCH PRODUCT

I-RP: Interference Aware Routing Protocol for WBAN

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The Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSN) have witnessed tremendous research interest because of their wide range of applications (medical and non-medical) in order to improve the quality of life. The healthcare applications of WBSN demands dissemination of patient’s data, reliably and in a timely manner. For this purpose, medical teams may use real-time applications for disseminating critical data such as blood pressure, ECG, and EEG. The critical data packets are highly delay sensitive that must reach intended destination within time constraints. Due to the exchange of real-time and multi-media data, some nodes or links may experience the significant level of interference in the network. Consequently, it results in transmission disruption, random number of packet drops, insufficient buffer space and lack of availability of bandwidth. Moreover, interference in the network strains the communication links, reduces the information delivery capacity of the network and leads to high collisions, packet losses, retransmission and energy consumption. Therefore, incorporating interference-awareness in routing decisions is desirable to enhance the performance of WBSN. In this paper, we present an Interference-aware Routing Protocol (I-RP) that makes use of composite routing metric incorporating link quality (in terms of link delay and interference level) and path length. This multi-facet routing strategy makes more informed routing decision regarding route selection in a way that, a route with the minimum level of interference and path length is selected. Moreover, it also increases the link reliability and minimizes the packet losses and retransmission. The simulation results demonstrate the improved performance of proposed scheme when compared to existing routing scheme in WBSN.