Gradient based temperature-aware routing in body area sensor networks

Abstract

One promising area of wireless body area networks is remotely diagnosing human health by implanting bio-medical sensors on or inside of a human body. Despite the benefit of such networks, one key challenge is that it should not cause harm at any time. Although the material of biomedical sensors are made to be harmless, the heat produced from sensing and communicating between sensors can still harm the surrounding human tissues. Therefore, unlike traditional wireless sensor networks, any operations performed in this network must be aware of this issue. In this paper, our goal is to route a packet along a cool path towards a coordinator node which is responsible for communication with the outside the world. Our approach is formulating this thermal routing problem as an artificial intelligence search problem. We use a temperature gradient as a cost function and select neighboring sensors that offer a cooler gradient value. Our approach is loosely based on the fringe search which avoids the overhead of sorting the nodes on every iteration of the search. We perform simulations and compare our proposed scheme with other existing well known schemes.