The wireless body area networks (WBANs) play an important role in monitoring and minimising the duration of patients stays at the hospital. The aim of our study was to design an energy efficient routing protocol for WBANs taking into consideration the minimisation of energy and maximisation of the network lifetime, such as that the routing is recognised as a resource hungry operation. In this protocol, to confront the different constraints, we use the concept of the gateway body sensor which is responsible for sending data to the base station. Some biosensors transmit data directly while some use clustering technique to send data, it depends on the type of transferred information. Simulation results showed that clustering based routing protocol for wireless body area network (CRPBA) improves the quality of our network by minimising the energy consumption and enhances the stability period.
Keywords: WBAN; clustering; energy consumption; health monitoring; routing protocol.