A dual channel routing protocol based on energy and link quality indicator in wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area networks (WBANs) are a subset of wireless sensor networks that interconnect miniaturized nodes with sensor or actuator capabilities in, on, or around a human body. WBANs offer number of routing protocols i.e., CICADA etc., but inefficient usage of network resources may lead to premature network failure. To increase energy efficiency, reliability and network load balancing, this paper presents a dual channel routing protocol called DCHREL (Dual Channel Routing Protocol based on Remaining Energy and Link Quality Indicator) that uses lexical routing techniques to select routes on the basis of hop count, end-to-end link quality and path remaining energy where the priority of these metrics is applied in decreasing order. The simulation results showed that DCHREL reduces not only energy consumption but achieves more uniform energy usage between nodes resulting in longer network lifetime.