A power-aware 2-covered path routing for wireless body area networks with variable transmission ranges

Wireless body area networks (WBAN) are an emerging form of technology which provides a base for various implantable and wearable sensors. This paper presents a 2-covered path routing that provides each WBAN along a path sheltered from an intersectional coverage of at least two WBAN hubs to provide high availability and reliable multi-hop communication in WBANs. In radio frequency (RF) systems, the power consumption required to transmit data grows at least quadratic times as its transmission range. Therefore, this paper studies the 2-covered path problem in which antennas have discrete transmission power levels. Given a set of n antennas with m available radii, a source and a sink on the plane, we propose three power-aware methods to construct 2-covered paths between source and sink. The proposed methods are graph transformation planning (GTP), 2-covered area stretching planning (TASP) and radii shrinking planning (RSP) which apply different strategies to reduce overall power consumption of the network. Experiments show that GTP obtains the maximum power saving while RSP and TASP are polynomial-time algorithms and save power up to 96% of those achieved by GTP.