Abstract
Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is among the most promising technologies for enhancing life quality. WBANs enable constant monitoring of physiological processes by implanting or wearing small, low-power, intelligent sensor nodes in or on the human body. These sensor nodes may be placed either invasively or non-invasively. Patient data must be disseminated reliably and promptly for WBAN's healthcare apps to function. For this reason, medical teams may use real-time apps for sharing vital information like blood pressure, an ECG, and an EEG. Critical data packets are delay-sensitive and must arrive at sink nodes within the time constraints that satisfy QoS for WBAN. However, networks' unpredictable and dynamic nature (node mobility, link partitioning) makes reliable data transfer a challenging task. Additionally, postural mobility and ultra-short wireless range cause rapid topology changes, resulting in network partitioning. The network partitioning causes failure of data delivery to the sink or coordinator and causes a delay as well. In the case of normal data, it is not a big issue, but it is not tolerable for emergency data because it may be life-threatening. Consequently, compromising the link reliability and stability results in higher delays, increased packet re-transmissions, and decreased throughput performance. Therefore, we propose an Enhanced Probabilistic Route Stability (EPRS) scheme to address these issues. The proposed EPRS scheme introduces a cost function called Link Assessment Cost (LAC) that makes coherent decisions regarding route reliability in determining whether an active route is a good candidate for routing and satisfying QoS requirements. The LAC is based on two critical factors about link status, i.e., Route Stability Factor (RSF) and Expected Probability of link E(p) . Based on these factors, a score is assigned to a link that determines the status (likelihood) of a link, either connected or disconnected. In this way, the multi-facet EPRS selects the most stable and reliable routes despite the disconnection in the networks, thereby improving the route stability and throughput, minimizing the end-to-end delay, route discovery calls, and re-transmissions as depicted by simulation results.