e-CLDC: Efficient Cross-Layer protocol for Data Collection in WBAN for remote patient monitoring

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) have lately attracted many researchers as a relatively new phenomenon that mainly emerged with the development of the wireless communication technologies and sensor devices to be able to fit in a person’s body. WBAN’s primary concerns range from energy efficient communication to designing delays efficient protocols that face human body mobility. In this work, we propose an efficient converge-cast, i.e data collection, protocol, e-CLDC. Our protocol is based on a cross-layer approach that involves Physical, MAC and Network layers. e-CLDC implements a multi-hop multi-path strategy to increase reliability and energy efficiency at network layer. A scheduling mechanism is also adopted at the MAC layer to avoid collisions and overhearing. In addition, sensor nodes adjust dynamically their transmission power and adapt it regarding the body posture at physical layer. e-CLDC achieves an average of 99% reliability for different body postures. Our protocol performances are compared to a one-hop strategy. The latter achieves only 64% and thus with a high sensors transmission power.