At present, sensor-based E-Healthcare systems are attracting more and more attention from academia and industry. E-Healthcare systems are usually a Wireless Body Area Network (WBANs), which can monitor or diagnose human health by placing miniaturized, low-power sensor nodes in or on patient's bodies to measure various physiological parameters. However, in this process, WBAN nodes usually use batteries, and especially for implantable flexible nodes, it is difficult to accomplish the battery replacement, so the energy that the node can carry is very limited, making the efficient use of energy the most important problem to consider when designing WBAN routing algorithms. By considering factors such as residual energy of node, the importance level of nodes, path cost and path energy difference ratios, this paper gives a definition of Optimal Path of Energy Consumption (OPEC) in WBANs, and designs the Optimal Energy Consumption routing based on Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) for WBANs (OEABC). A performance simulation is carried out to verify the effectiveness of the OEABC. Simulation results demonstrate that compared with the genetic algorithm and ant colony algorithm, the proposed OEABC has a better energy efficiency and faster convergence rate.
Keywords: Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm; E-Healthcare system; energy consumption; wireless body area networks.