This paper proposes an alternative model to deliver vital signs of patients in a hospital indoor environment where a large number of patients exist and the traffic generated rapidly changes over time using Body Area Network (BAN). The methodology for finding an optimal path includes a meta-heuristic that combines ANT Colony Optimization (ACO). The authors propose an ACO based framework for monitoring data originating from a BAN to improve network life, energy and load balancing of the overall network. Since the traffic generated by BANs on the network changes with time, finding a shortest path is important for Hospital Area Network. In this paper, the authors implemented an ACO based method and have carried out simulations using OMNeT++ to prove that the proposed method can find a better solution than conventional methods.
TopWireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) (Figure 1) together with HAN have created a high impact on the health care because of ageing population due to its sedentary lifestyle and poor diet resulting in an increase in number of people with chronic disease which requires continuous monitoring of the patient. Wireless sensor network technology offers a large scale and cost-effective solutions to this problem. It has become necessity for providing the quality health care timely by using Wireless Body Area Network technology. Authors in (ZK.et.al 2013), for an indoor hospital scenario, it uses centralized and distributed mode of communicating the BAN data packets which are sensitive and critical packets. Communication of the data packets plays a vital role in WBAN, since it consumes energy of the sensor node and that can be optimized by finding the best route to address all important issues concerned with latency, throughput.
Figure 1. General WBAN architecture
The challenges related to the management of patient’s medical information and an intelligent continuous monitoring of BAN data in hospital environment is discussed (Chen et al. 2010). Many researchers (Wood et al., 2006, Chen et al., 2009; Huang and Fang, 2008; Liang et al., 2008; Razzaque et al., 2008, Curtis et al., 2008; Gao et al., 2007; Agarwal et al., 2010, ZKhan et al., 2013, Ugolotti et al., 2013; Amoretti et al., 2013) have proposed BAN network architecture by combining or splitting the BAN in inter-BAN communication but they failed to address the real time display of BAN data in indoor hospital environment using soft computing approach
TopProposed Energy Efficient Of Wban Using Ant Colony Optimization Technique
The proposed algorithm ANT based optimization is inspired by ant food foraging intelligence, where routing is done for exploration and updating of pheromones through locally and globally. When a source node wants to send data to the destination node i.e. NSC, it sends its ants like packets locally to find its new paths. During this process, they update their information in the pheromone and routing table regarding the most visited nodes and also the information regarding the pheromone and energy values of the visited nodes. This helps in laying down the communication links between adjacent nodes by making the paths stronger to send reliable data to the sink.
General Procedure
The general procedure of the proposed method is shown Algorithm 1. The shortest path from source to destination includes all the BANs and MDCs. When the ants move, the search is repeated.