(IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, Vol. 12, No. 9, 2021 268 | Page www.ijacsa.thesai.org SNR based Energy Efficient Communication Protocol for Emergency Applications in WBAN K. Viswavardhan Reddy 1 Electronics Engineering, Jain University Bengaluru, India Navin Kumar 2 Dept. of ECE, Amrita School of Engineering, AVV Bengaluru, India Abstract—Continuous remote monitoring of a patient’s health condition in dynamic environment imposes many challenges. Challenges further get multiplied based on the size of body area sensor network. One such challenge is energy efficiency of sensors. Maintaining longer life of all nodes, especially who participate in communicating vital signals from one network to another towards the base station is very important. In this work, an energy efficient communication protocol for the wireless body area network (WBAN) is proposed. The essential characteristics of the protocol are: random deployment of nodes, formation of clusters, node with high signal to noise ratio (SNR) as cluster head (CH), random rotation of CHs within each cluster, and so on. The developed algorithm is simulated in MATLAB by varying the number of nodes and networks. Obtained results are compared with some of the recent and most relevant existing works. It is found that there is an enhancement in the network lifetime by 19.5%, throughput by 12.61% and average remaining energy by 57.21%. Keywords—WBAN; energy efficiency; emergency applications; protocol; remote monitoring I. INTRODUCTION The usage of information and communication technology (ICT) in healthcare sector is not so widely visible even in the pandemic. Enormous challenges in demand of healthcare centre were encountered [1]. People even in urban areas require doctor appointment and physically visit them if they have any health problem. This has been in practice for a long time and continues even now. Significant research, what we call IOTization, has been around in almost every industry such as smart city, smart home, smart agriculture, smart class room, smart governance, smart and intelligent transport, smart eHealth [2-4]. However, to some extent, smartness is observed in the case of home, in the case of manufacturing but smartness in the case of eHealth is still a miles away. It is limited to a very few individuals who can somehow monitors some of his/her body parameters using smart watch, band, and so on. During this pandemic situation, when social distancing has become very important, health industry should have seen significant growth in terms of usage of monitoring devices and techniques. Unfortunately, we are far behind. Though, there are many tiny, cheap and smart sensors modules available which can be kept on the body of human within and outside or vicinity of body of human. This type of network is well known as body area network (BAN). Furthermore, this BAN is expected to be dynamic and mobile, such system is known as wireless BAN (WBAN). WBAN allows monitoring of health data of a patient or person from remote. The usage of such networks at this time period could have been significantly increased. Despite that a large number of papers, investigations are available on the subject [5], but practical implementation and usage is not promising due to requirements of bandwidth, high storage capabilities and high- power usage. Additionally, huge information transformation and estimation is required at the edge or cloud. Could computing [6] can be used with regular transformation and data analysis. This inquiry can then be used by the clinicians for providing better treatment of patient in healthcare as well as research. In addition, remote monitoring, consultation, counselling can be easily done. Furthermore, when patient is mobile and dynamic, the system complexity and requirement would be different. One of the important problems would be communicating information from one network to other networks towards the patient’s parent cloud, that is, routing of information from the source to destination. WBAN routing protocols are classified into energy aware routing, cross-layer routing, temperature-based routing, cluster-based routing, posture-based routing and quality of service (QoS)-based routing [7]. An opportunistic power- efficient routing with load balancing (OE2-LB) by eliminating the delay caused during the aggregation process algorithm has been proposed in [8]. It helps in avoiding the loops that occur in routing in a more effective way. Authors claimed to have developed a better algorithm with respect to throughput delay, aggregation time, energy, and live nodes count. A power efficient communication protocol for transmitting the data more reliably is proposed by selecting appropriate next hop node [9]. In this, to select next hop node, a maximum benefit function has been defined. It uses parameters like residual power, bandwidth, efficiency in transmission and number of hops to sink. The performance of the proposed protocol is simulated in MATLAB and evaluated with PERA and NEW- ATTEMPT protocols. In [10], a clustering routing protocol for WBANs (CRPBA) is developed for maximizing the network lifetime and minimization of power dissipation for the nodes. The performance of the developed algorithm is evaluated with specifications such as total number of nodes 24; initial energy of each node is 0. 5J and total number of 7000 rounds. The reported results showed the first node death at 3375 rounds. In [11], authors developed iMSIMPLE: improved stable increased-throughput multi-hop link adept communication protocol. A cost function is defined by considering various parameters such as distance to sink and residual power has been used for selecting a new forwarding node. Simulations