A Broadcasting Routing Approach To Solve Gateway Failure Issue In Wireless Body Area Network

A broadcasting routing approach to solve gateway failure issue in wirless body area network
one of the major players in remote monitoring system is wireless body area networks (wban). WBAN has a potential of playing an incredible role in healthcare system especially in the management of health information and bio-signal data of the elderly people and chronic diseases patients. WBAN consists of medical sensors, batteries, and small patches for radio communication.

Architecturally, a typical architecture of WBAN application is usually involves a medical sensor, a gateway and a medical server. The medical sensors are numerous such as ecg, emg, eeg, pressure sensor, pulse rate, temperature, diabetes and so on. Each of these medical sensors sense a specific bio-signal data in a patient.
The sensor receives bio-signal data from a patient and transmit it to the gateway device and the latter forward it to the server. The gateway device might be a stand-alone computer base station or a smart phone. The smart phone is commonly used nowadays as a gateway due to its mobility, portability and accessibility features.
However, due to the nature of the smart phones, their failure is unavoidable either in terms of power drainage, stolen or loss of connection. When the gateway device fails, the medical sensor will lose its communication pattern and the whole system will collapse. The medical sensor cannot cover-up for the gateway failure due to its limited buffer rate because of its small memory capacity and energy consumption constraint.

In addition, there are have been a situation in which multiple medical sensors are worn by a patient for taking different bio-signal readings such as ecg and eeg, or multiple patients wear different sensors but share the gateway device, interference during routing of packets between the sensor nodes communicating under the same ism 2.4GHz wireless communication is inevitable and remained unsolved in the current state-of-the-art methods.
More so, power consumption of WBAN sensor is a crucial challenge due to continuous transmission of packets. In the research, we are proposing a novel power consumption scheme in the sensor node to aggregate the urgent packets and transmit over the network.

As such, in this research, the researcher is proposing a novel packet broadcasting technique for gateway failure in Wban, and an interference aware mechanism which controls the frequency interference during multi-sensor single-gateway transmission, and power consumption scheme in the sensor node to reduce packet transmission.
research objectives
•    the packet broadcasting technique is an alternative routing technique for medical sensor to forward its packets to the server through other nearby gateway devices by means of packet broadcasting. The sensor is equipped with an algorithm which enhance its ability to switch to any available nearby gateway with minimum delay and distance. This approach will enhance the reliability and scalability of WBAN system.

Performance metric: Packet Delivery Ratio, Power consumption, throughput, latency, delay, scalability, reliability, QoS, node mobility, routing overhead and so on.
Example:
Default transmission: Sensor -> gateway device (i.e smart phone) -> Server
Now, if smart phone dies of battery or stolen or loss of internet connection,
Proposed transmission: Sensor -> search & use any nearby smartphones -> Server
•    Likewise, inefficient packet routing management during the gateway sharing by multiple sensors can cause an increase in packet loss and has a great effect on packet delivery ratio. As such, the proposed interference management scheme will reduce the congestion issue between the multiple sensors sharing the same gateway device which are transmitting on the same ISM frequency 2.4GHz.

Performance metrics: interference, network congestion, PDR, and so on
For example:
Normal transmission: Sensor -> gateway (Smartphone) -> Server (this means that one sensor one gateway. If 20 patient is required to be monitored, 20 smartphones will be needed to send each patient’s data to the server).
Now, let’s say multiple patients want to use only one gateway device (smartphone)
Multiple Sensor -> Smartphone -> Server (but interference algorithm needs to be implemented to avoid packet collision).

•    Comparison between
o    The proposed gateway algorithm and conventional system (without gateway failure algorithm). Performance metrics: PDR, reliability, scalability, power consumption.
O    The proposed interference scheme algorithm and conventional system (a system without interferences algorithm).