PSOBAN: a novel particle swarm optimization based protocol for wireless body area networks

In the modern world, wireless body area networks (WBAN) is projected to play a vital role in biomedical and psychological applications. The practical implementation of WBAN technology surfer from various deployment issues that have to be dealt with. The more serious concern is associated with the energy consumption of these networks. Biosensor nodes continuously sense the signals and send the same to sink. Sending data to sink is an energy-consuming operation, so routing is done to optimize energy utilization in WBAN. The continuous data sensing and the transmission of information over long-distances result in huge energy consumption of these nodes. So, conservation of energy is the need of the hour. The main focus of the current study is to invise a routing mechanism that makes use of particle swarm optimization based on metaheuristic algorithm along with the relay node selection based on distances and residual energies. Experimental results show that the proposed protocol strikes a perfect balance between minimizing the number of relay nodes (to be positioned on subject) along with the energy efficient WBAN.