# Multipath Routing in Wireless Body Area Sensor Network for Healthcare Monitoring
###### Abstract  
Mobility and low energy consumption are considered the main requirements for wireless body area sensor networks (WBASN) used in healthcare monitoring systems (HMS). In HMS, battery-powered sensor nodes with limited energy are used to obtain vital statistics about the body. Hence, energy-efficient schemes are desired to maintain long-term and steady connectivity of the sensor nodes. A sheer amount of energy is consumed in activities such as idle listening, excessive transmission and reception of control messages, packet collisions and retransmission of packets, and poor path selection, that may lead to more energy consumption. A combination of adaptive scheduling with an energy-efficient protocol can help select an appropriate path at a suitable time to minimize the control overhead, energy consumption, packet collision, and excessive idle listening. This paper proposes a region-based energy-efficient multipath routing (REMR) approach that divides the entire sensor network into clusters with preferably multiple candidates to represent each cluster. The cluster representatives (CRs) route packets through various clusters. For routing, the energy requirement of each route is considered, and the path with minimum energy requirements is selected. Similarly, end-to-end delay, higher throughput, and packet-delivery ratio are considered for packet routing.  
healthcare monitoring; wireless body area networks; multipath routing; energy-efficient routing 20221022972022202220220220220220220220220220220220220220220220220222022022202220222022202222022220  
and introducing compression may significantly improve the performance of the network as well as battery usage.  
The existing solutions improve WBAN availability by enhancing the sensor battery due to the employment of various techniques, such as clustering, optimizing frame length, SDN-based routing, aggregated routing, and energy-aware routing [1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6]. However, enhancing the coverage area of WBAN while preserving the battery needs an optimal approach, such as multi-hop routing, that uses hop-to-hop relay, thus avoiding the requirement of excessive transmission power.  
The proposed solution provides network optimization and distributes the processing tasks to keep nodes alive in the network, even with very few resources. To achieve network optimization, a multi-hop transmission of data is introduced to reduce the use of energy while maintaining the signal strength to transmit data over a long distance. A neighboring node with an acceptable batter level may take the responsibility of transmitting data on the behalf of a sensor having limited energy resources. For processing, an algorithm is proposed to assign data-aggregation tasks to the nodes selected as head nodes after considering numerous factors, such as remaining battery power, processing capability, and distance from the base station. The main contributions of this paper are as follows:  
* A region-based energy-efficient multipath routing approach is presented that divides the entire network into clusters to increase the lifetime of sensors in HMS.
* A mechanism to select cluster representatives is proposed to route the packets through different clusters after selecting a path requiring minimum energy.
* The proposed scheme provides better delay, throughput, packet-delivery ratio, and energy consumption as compared to other schemes.  
This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 contains the discussion of important works related to this study followed by the proposed methodology and region-based energy-efficient multipath routing algorithm in Section 3. Section 4 provides a performance analysis of simulation results. Lastly, the conclusion is given in Section 5.