Energy-efficient aware and predicting bandwidth estimation routing protocol for hybrid communication in wireless body area networks

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are an emerging field in the domain of healthcare which are typically composed of biomedical sensors. These sensors are implanted inside or attached to the human body for monitoring a patient’s condition and providing accurate treatment to patients. In WBANs, energy efficiency is a critical concern due to the restricted battery capacity of the sensors. Extending the network lifetime and reducing the energy consumption of these sensor nodes can significantly impact the reliability and effectiveness of WBANs in monitoring patients’ health. An efficient routing protocol based on energy-related parameters is crucial in designing these networks. Although many routing protocols have been proposed for routing in WBANs, sufficient features have not been properly handled in these methods. To overcome these issues, a novel routing protocol named Simple Energy Efficient and Bandwidth Aware (SEBA) routing protocol is proposed for routing in WBANs. The proposed scheme considers multiple metrics of the network node, such as remaining energy, energy harvesting, draining rate energy, available bandwidth, and number of hops in a route selection to minimize energy consumption, increase network lifetimes, and enhance the reliability of data transmission in WBANs. Additionally, the SEBA uses a novel mechanism to change the route dynamically based on energy consumption. This mechanism plays a significant role in reducing the number of route errors, route discoveries, and distributing energy consumption among sensor nodes. The experimental results reveal that the proposed scheme performs well in terms of average network throughput, packet delivery ratio, normalized routing load, average end-to-end delay, energy consumption, and network lifetime compared with the existing AMCRP, EEMP, and EAR protocols.