Coordinate-assisted Routing in a Biomedical Sensor Network with Schedule-based Dynamic Sink

Wireless sensor networks find wide applications in health monitoring of human subjects. The main challenges are finding the optimal routing path, number of hops for minimization of node energy and latency to deliver the data packets to the sink. In this work, a new coordinate-assisted routing strategy is proposed in a network consisting of biomedical sensor nodes (BSNs), arranged in a regular grid matrix with the dynamic sink moving within the grid. The movement schedule of the dynamic sink is prior known to the BSNs. The routing path is selected based on the directional movement of the sink. The data packets are delivered to the most probable nearest neighbour of the dynamic sink by estimating the time gap between the current and next position of the sink and the neighbouring regions around the sink. The proposed scheme is validated in simulation with 81 number of BSNs and it was found that the average node lifetime is 511 sessions. While comparing with most recent works with same initial parameters, an improvement on the first node die (FND) parameter was observed. This scheme can be useful in an in-house hospital environment patient data collection with a healthcare staff (nursing personnel) being assigned with a schedule-based patient medication as a routine activity.