A Survey on Thermal Aware Routing Protocols in Wireless Body Area Network

Abstract: Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a wireless network of wearable devices in or around the human body to serve a variety of applications. In healthcare, sensors might be implanted in or around the human body to monitor and detect abnormal behaviors. In addition to the resource limitations for WBAN, more challenges are existing when applying WBAN for human body applications as in the medical field. Coming to the safety aspect, a major consideration needed to address the heating effects due to wireless communication which cause damage to the surrounding tissues. Therefore, thermal aware routing protocols were proposed by researchers to consider the temperature of the implanted medical devices while routing. This survey presents a state of are for thermal aware routing protocols as a step for coming research addressing the same issue. It provides a comparison between the existing protocols, to finally list the routing design challenges for future research.

Keywords: WBAN, thermal-aware, routing protocol, hotspot, temperature.