Title: Mobility handling in wireless body area networks for patient monitoring in smart hospital

Authors: R. Venkateswari; S. Subha Rani

Addresses: Electronics and Communication Engineering Department, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore – 641004, Tamil Nadu, India ' Electronics and Communication Engineering Department, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore – 641004, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: Wireless body area networks (WBANs) is a wireless network of wearable and implantable computing devices or sensor nodes. These sensor nodes can be worn externally or implanted internally in the human body to monitor multiple health parameters of patients. Low power consumption, low delay and high data rate are the performance metrics of WBAN. This work aims to develop a wireless body area network, which continuously monitors the patients who are mobile and to report the information efficiently to the sink by routing. The challenges faced when dealing with mobility are, increase in power consumption and transmission range. These issues have been resolved by optimising the RPL and MAC parameters. The performance of the RPL protocol by varying the DIO parameters and the channel check rate is analysed with ContikiMAC as the underlying MAC protocol. The designed parameters provide twice the packet delivery ratio compared to the default protocol parameters.

Keywords: wireless BANs; body area networks; WBANs; Contiki; routing protocol; RPL; mobility; patient monitoring; medium access control; MAC; packet delivery ratio; PDR; destination oriented directed acyclic graph; DODAG; smart hospitals; power consumption; transmission range; healthcare technology.

DOI: 10.1504/IJENM.2015.073868

International Journal of Enterprise Network Management, 2015 Vol.6 No.4, pp.251 - 262

Received: 08 Nov 2014
Accepted: 06 Dec 2014

Published online: 27 Dec 2015 *

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