Increase in lifetime by harvested energy and analysis of RC5 along with efficient energy consumption in WBAN

摘要

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have emerged as a new technology for health care systems. It allows the data of a patient’s vital body parameters and movements to be collected by small wearable or implantable sensors and communicated using short-range wireless communication techniques. Limited energy capacity to sustain the WBAN nodes for an extended period of time has always been a matter of concern. In this paper, we compare and analyze different types of standard symmetric cryptography based algorithms to be implemented in WBANs for security purpose. RC5 being a highly efficient and flexible cryptographic algorithm, with many flexible parameters (key size, block size, number of rounds) can be adjusted to tradeoff security strength with power consumption and computational overhead. Thus, RC5 with suitable parameters may perform well for WBAN applications with different data size. We propose an algorithm comprising of operating the sensor nodes in rest modes that is both in sleep as well as active mode accordingly, based on sets of data transmissions. Equal priority is set for all the cluster members (CMs) along with a fixed cluster head (CH). The concept of energy harvesting has also been implemented in our algorithm to maximize the power supply. Increase in the network lifetime using both rest mode and increased energy supply has been observed using different case studies.