Efficient Routing Protocol Based on Entropy Method for WBAN with Kinetic Energy Harvesting

Wireless body area network (WBAN) has made a significant contributions in health monitoring. However, due to the limited energy supply, sensor nodes must achieve physiological measurements with minimum energy consumption in order to maintain long-term monitoring. In this article, we design a kinetic energy harvestion device to provide energy for sensor nodes and propose a energy level classification routing protocol (ELC) to simultaneously optimize network lifetime, transmission reliability and energy efficiency. The protocol comprehensively considers several WBAN parameters such as residual energy, transmission distance and link reliability of the sensor node as the factors of the multi-objective optimal function, and adjusts the weights of these factors based on the entropy method according to the actual measured data. After extensive simulation comparisons with other existing routing protocols the results show significant improvement in network lifetime, transmission reliability and energy efficiency.