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Abstract-Recent technological advancements in wireless communication, integrated circuits and Micro-ElectroMechanical Systems (MEMs) has enabled miniaturized, lowpower, intelligent, invasive/ non-invasive micro and nanotechnology sensor nodes placed in or on the human body for use in monitoring body function and its immediate environment referred to as Body Area Networks (BANs). BANs face many stringent requirements in terms of delay, power, temperature and network lifetime which need to be taken into serious consideration in the design of different protocols. Since routing protocols play an important role in the overall system performance in terms of delay, power consumption, temperature and so on, a thorough study on existing routing protocols in BANs is necessary. Also, the specific challenges of BANs necessitates the design of new routing protocols specifically designed for BANs. This paper provides a survey of existing routing protocols mainly proposed for BANs. These protocols are further classified into five main categories namely, temperature based, crosslayer, cluster based, cost-effective and QoS-based routing, where each protocol is described under its specified category. Also, comparison among routing protocols in each category is given.

In this paper, a dynamic resource allocation scheme is proposed to avoid interference amongst coexisting Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). In the proposed scheme, each WBAN generates a table consisting of interfering nodes from coexisting WBANs in its vicinity. Then each WBAN broadcasts this table to its neighbors, which allows for efficient interpretation of an Interference Region (IR) between each pair of WBANs. The nodes in the IR are later allocated orthogonal sub-channels; whilst nodes that do not exist in the IR can potentially transmit in the same time interval. We further demonstrate a precise tradeoff between the minimum interference level and spatial reuse. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme has far better spectral efficiency compared to the conventional orthogonal schemes, whilst maintaining an acceptable interference level. We also provide mathematical analysis on the proposed scheme to validate its efficiency for increasing spectral efficiency and avoiding interference. To further reduce the interference level, we propose a probabilistic approach, and analytically show that the outage probability can be effectively reduced at the cost of very small change in the spatial reuse factor.

Abstract-Research on routing in a network of intelligent, lightweight, micro and nano-technology sensors deployed in or around the body, namely Body Area Network (BAN), has gained great interest in the recent years. In this paper, we present an energy efficient, thermal and power aware routing algorithm for BANs named Energy Efficient Thermal and Power Aware routing (ETPA). ETPA considers a node's temperature, energy level and received power from adjacent nodes in the cost function calculation. An optimization problem is also defined in order to minimize average temperature rise in the network. Our analysis demonstrates that ETPA can significantly decrease temperature rise and power consumption as well as providing a more efficient usage of the available resources compared to the most efficient routing protocol proposed so far in BANs, namely PRPLC. Also, ETPA has a considerably higher depletion time that guarantees a longer lasting communication among nodes.