An AHP-Based Flexible Relay Node Selection Scheme for WBANs

A Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a communication network that provides both medical and consumer electronics services by using sensors in/on/around a human body. In general, a WBAN environment suffers from frequent link loss due to interferences among sensors scattered over a body. In addition, the channel condition can frequently change by postural body movement, which increases packet drops, retransmissions, and eventually power consumption. This paper presents an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)-based flexible relay node selection scheme that considers a multitude of decision factors, such as average SNR, remaining energy ratio, and traffic load. Moreover, the proposed scheme can adaptively satisfy the requirements of WBAN in various scenarios. Our simulation study shows that the proposed method provides high communication reliability and low power consumption.