Analysing the Effect of Posture Mobility and Sink Node Placement on the Performance of Routing Protocols in WBAN.

Objective: Wireless Body area network is a combination of sensor nodes which communicate with each other through wireless link. Sensor nodes sense the data and sent to sink node. Sink node process the data received by the sensor nodes and send to the medical official. It aims at finding an optimal position of the sink in human body to place that gives better network lifetime, stability period and throughout. Methods/Analysis: Various routing protocols are developed for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). In these networks routing protocols plays an important role together with position of sink node. In this paper two routing protocols Adaptive Threshold-based Thermal-aware Energy-efficient Multi-hop ProTocol (ATTEMPT) and SIMPLE routing protocols are analyzed with different body posture mobility (arm, head, and leg) and different sink position. ATTEMPT protocol considers the body posture mobility factor when designing but SIMPLE protocol is not mobility aware. Findings: The protocol performs better when the sink node is placed at the center of the human body with no body posture mobility but the packet drop is high. When the sink node is placed at different body part which has the posture mobility and when position of the sink node is fixed at the center of the human body, there is more effect on the performance of SIMPLE protocol than ATTEMPT protocol. But overall the network lifetime and stability period is high in case of SIMPLE protocol than ATTEMPT protocol. Order of variation in body parts movement is ARM>Leg>Head. Applications/Improvements: This paper shows that the variation in the placement of a sink node within a WBAN with body posture movement could significantly vary the overall performance of the routing protocols. This motivated the researchers to work on an effective node placement strategy for a sink node, within a WBAN with the consideration for body posture mobility.