Extending Lifetime of Biomedical Wireless Sensor Networks using Energy-Aware Routing and Relay Nodes

Biomedical wireless sensor networks are a key technology to enable the development of new healthcare services and/or applications, reducing costs and improving the citizen's quality of life. However, since they deal with health data, such networks should implement mechanisms to enforce high levels of quality of service. In most cases, the sensor nodes that form such networks are small and battery powered, and these extra quality of service mechanisms mean significant lifetime reduction due to the extra energy consumption. The network lifetime is thus a relevant feature to ensure the necessary quality of service requirements. In order to maximise the network lifetime, and its ability to offer the required quality of service, new strategies are needed to increase the energy efficiency, and balance in the network. The focus of this work goes to the effective use of the available energy in each node, combined with information about the reliability of the wireless links, as a metric to form reliable and energy-aware routes throughout the network. This paper present and discusses two different deployment strategies using energy-aware routing and relay nodes, assessed for different logical topologies. The authors' conclusion is that the use of energy-aware routing combined with strategic placed relay nodes my increase the network lifetime as high as 45%.