A Review of Routing Protocols in Wireless Body Area Networks

Recent technological advancements in wireless communication, integrated circuits and Micro-ElectroMechanical Systems (MEMs) has enabled miniaturized, lowpower, intelligent, invasive/ non-invasive micro and nanotechnology sensor nodes placed in or on the human body for use in monitoring body function and its immediate environment referred to as Body Area Networks (BANs). BANs face many stringent requirements in terms of delay, power, temperature and network lifetime which need to be taken into serious consideration in the design of different protocols. Since routing protocols play an important role in the overall system performance in terms of delay, power consumption, temperature and so on, a thorough study on existing routing protocols in BANs is necessary. Also, the specific challenges of BANs necessitates the design of new routing protocols specifically designed for BANs. This paper provides a survey of existing routing protocols mainly proposed for BANs. These protocols are further classified into five main categories namely, temperature based, crosslayer, cluster based, cost-effective and QoS-based routing, where each protocol is described under its specified category. Also, comparison among routing protocols in each category is given.