Abstract
A wireless body area network (WBAN) is a type of wireless sensor network that plays a crucial role in monitoring patient healthcare. In this network, sensor nodes are typically placed inside or outside the patient’s body. These nodes are capable of transmitting data to the sink node when any functional changes in the patient are detected. The routing and energy efficiency of the network nodes are challenging tasks in WBAN, as each sensor node operates on a battery. Therefore, in multi-hop routing designing a robust routing protocol has a significant impact on reducing energy consumption during the selection of the next hop. In this paper, a simple novel routing protocol named simple energy-aware and reliable (SEAR) routing protocol is proposed to transmit reliable data packets in a WBAN. The proposed routing scheme considers the remaining energy of sensor nodes, priority data, and hop count to the sink node as significant metrics for dynamically selecting the best forwarder node. Furthermore, the proposed protocol utilizes the route reliability factor (RRF) to select the optimal route among all possible routes between the source sensor node and the sink node. RRF selects the route with the maximum route residual energy and minimum hop count. As a result, SEAR has the ability to provide effective single-hop and multi-hop routing data transmission to improve the reliability of data transmission, decrease the energy consumption of the sensor nodes, and prolong the lifetime of the network. The simulation results show that the performance of the SEAR routing protocol outperforms the existing routing protocols for the metrics: packet loss ratio, throughput, end-to-end delay, normalized routing load, energy consumption, and network lifetime. The results indicate that the proposed protocol improves total energy consumption by 18.76% and 10.89% when compared to EERR-RLFL and AMCRP respectively. Meanwhile, SEAR reduces the average end-to-end delay by 17% and 9%, packet loss ratio by 29.48% and 17.69%, and normalized routing load by 31.17% and 20.91%. Additionally, SEAR achieves up to 16% and 9.71% higher throughput compared to EERR-RLFL and AMCRP routing protocols respectively. Overall, the results obtained indicate that the proposed SEAR routing scheme significantly enhances the overall performance of the network.













Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this manuscript article.
Code availability
The code used or analyzed during the current study is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
References
Movassaghi S, Abolhasan M, Lipman J, Smith D, Jamalipour A (2014) Wireless body area networks: a survey. IEEE Commun Surv Tutor 16(3):1658–1686
Ullah F, Khan MZ, Mehmood G, Qureshi MS, Fayaz M (2022) Energy efficiency and reliability considerations in wireless body area networks: a survey. Comput Math Methods Med 2022:1090131
Ahmad N, Awan MD, Khiyal MSH, Babar MI, Abdelmaboud A, Ibrahim HA, Hamed NO (2022) Improved QoS aware routing protocol (IM-QRP) for WBAN based healthcare monitoring system. IEEE Access 10:121864–121885
Yang G, Wu XW, Li Y, Ye Q (2020) Energy efficient protocol for routing and scheduling in wireless body area networks. Wirel Netw 26:1265–1273
Wang X, Zheng G, Ma H, Bai W, Wu H, Ji B (2021) Fuzzy control-based energy-aware routing protocol for wireless body area networks. J Sens 2021:1–3
Zadoo M, Sharma M, Choudhary A (2022) FEELS: fuzzy based energy efficient and low SAR routing protocol for wireless body area networks. Wirel Netw 28(8):3593–3611
Sharma S, Mishra VM, Tripathi MM (2022) A novel energy efficient hybrid Meta-heuristic approach (NEEMA) for wireless body area network. Int J Commun Syst 35(13):e5249
Poongodi T, Rathee A, Indrakumari R, Suresh P (2020) IoT sensing capabilities: sensor deployment and node discovery, wearable sensors, wireless body area network (WBAN), data acquisition. Principles of internet of things (IoT) ecosystem: insight paradigm. Springer, Cham, pp 127–151
Hajar MS, Al-Kadri MO, Kalutarage HK (2021) A survey on wireless body area networks: architecture, security challenges and research opportunities. Comput Secur 104:102211
Nguyen NT, Liu BH, Pham VT, Luo YS (2016) On maximizing the lifetime for data aggregation in wireless sensor networks using virtual data aggregation trees. Comput Netw 105:99–110
Kamruzzaman MM, Alruwaili O (2022) Energy efficient sustainable wireless body area network design using network optimization with smart grid and renewable energy systems. Energy Rep 8:3780–3788
Ahmed G, Jianhua Z, Fareed MMS (2017) PERA: priority-based energy-efficient routing algorithm for WBANs. Wirel Pers Commun 96(3):4737–4753
Akbar S, Mehdi MM, Jamal MH, Raza I, Hussain SA, Breñosa J, Espinosa JC, Pascual Barrera AE, Ashraf I (2022) Multipath routing in wireless body area sensor network for healthcare monitoring. InHealthcare 10(11):2297. MDPI.
Fort A, Ryckaert J, Desset C, De Doncker P, Wambacq P, Van Biesen L (2006) Ultra-wideband channel model for communication around the human body. IEEE J Sel Areas Commun 24(4):927–933
Abdullah A, Ozen E, Bayramoglu H (2022) Enhanced-AODV routing protocol to improve route stability of MANETs. Int Arab J Inf Technol 19(5):736–746
Arafat MY, Pan S, Bak E (2023) Distributed energy-efficient clustering and routing for wearable IoT enabled wireless body area networks. IEEE Access 11:5047–5061
Chavva SR, Sangam RS (2022) SIMPLE-DRR: A new energy-efficient multi-hop routing protocol in WBANs for health monitoring. In Advances in micro-electronics Embedded Systems and IoT. Springer, Singapore, pp 29–39
Akbar MS, Hussain Z, Sheng M, Shankaran R (2022) Wireless body area sensor networks: Survey of MAC and routing protocols for patient monitoring under IEEE 802.15. 4 and IEEE 802.15. 6. Sensors 22(21):8279
Abdullah AM (2023) A novel routing protocol for VANETs based on link stability and available bandwidth. Adhoc Sens Wirel Netw 55:95–122
Abdullah AM, Ozen E, Bayramoglu H (2020) Energy efficient MANET routing protocol based on ant colony optimization. Adhoc Sens Wirel Netw 47(1–4):73–96
Abdullah AM, Ozen E, Bayramoglu H (2019) Investigating the impact of mobility models on MANET routing protocols. Int J Adv Comput Sci Appl. https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100204
Yessad N, Omar M, Tari A, Bouabdallah A (2018) QoS-based routing in wireless body area networks: a survey and taxonomy. Computing 100(3):245–275
Ullah F, Khan MZ, Faisal M, Rehman HU, Abbas S, Mubarek FS (2021) An energy efficient and reliable routing scheme to enhance the stability period in wireless body area networks. Comput Commun 165:20–32
Ahmad N, Shahzad B, Arif M, Izdrui D, Ungurean I, Geman O (2022) An energy-efficient framework for WBAN in health care domain. J Sens. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/5823461
Kim BS, Kim KI, Shah B, Ullah S (2019) A forwarder based temperature aware routing protocol in wireless body area networks. J Int Technol 20(4):1157–1166
Abdullah AM, Aziz RHH (2014) The impact of reactive routing protocols for transferring multimedia data over MANET. J Zankoy Sulaimani-Part A 16(4):9–24
Mateen Yaqoob M, Khurshid W, Liu L, Zulqarnain Arif S, Ali Khan I, Khalid O, Nawaz R (2022) Adaptive multi-cost routing protocol to enhance lifetime for wireless body area network. Comput Mater Contin 72(1):1089–1103
Guo W, Wang Y, Gan Y, Lu T (2022) Energy efficient and reliable routing in wireless body area networks based on reinforcement learning and fuzzy logic. Wirel Netw 28(6):2669–2693
Goyal R, Mittal N, Gupta L, Surana A (2023) Routing protocols in wireless body area networks: architecture, challenges, and classification. Wirel Commun Mob Comput. https://doi.org/10.1155/2023/9229297
Qu Y, Zheng G, Ma H, Wang X, Ji B, Wu H (2019) A survey of routing protocols in WBAN for healthcare applications. Sensors 19(7):1638
Ahmed G, Mahmood D, Islam S (2019) Thermal and energy aware routing in wireless body area networks. Int J Distrib Sens Netw 15(6):1550147719854974
Bilandi N, Verma HK, Dhir R (2021) Energy-efficient relay node selection scheme for sustainable wireless body area networks. Sustain Comput Inform Syst 30:100516
Kim B, Cho J, Jeon S, Lee B (2016) An AHP-based flexible relay node selection scheme for WBANs. Wirel Pers Commun 89:501–520
Navya V, Deepalakshmi P (2021) Threshold-based energy-efficient routing for transmission of critical physiological parameters in a wireless body area network under emergency scenarios. Int J Comput Appl 43(4):367–376
Esmaeili H, Bidgoli BM (2018) EMRP: evolutionary-based multi-hop routing protocol for wireless body area networks. AEU-int J Electron Commun 93:63–74
Wu H, Zhu H, Gu J, Peng C, Han X (2022) Efficient health data transmission method in a wireless body area network for rural elderly. Electronics 11(18):2817
Abdullah AM (2024) Energy-efficient aware and predicting bandwidth estimation routing protocol for hybrid communication in wireless body area networks. Clust Comput. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-023-04262-w
Kiran MV, Nithya B (2023) Stable and energy-efficient next-hop router selection (SE-NRS) for wireless body area networks. Int J Inf Technol 15(2):1189–1200
Ullah F, Ullah Z, Ahmad S, Islam IU, Rehman SU, Iqbal J (2019) Traffic priority based delay-aware and energy efficient path allocation routing protocol for wireless body area network. J Ambient Intell Humaniz Comput 10:3775–3794
Ahmed O, Hu M, Ren F (2021) PEDTARA: priority-based energy efficient, delay and temperature aware routing algorithm using multi-objective genetic chaotic spider monkey optimization for critical data transmission in WBANs. Electronics 11(1):68
Bedi P, Das S, Goyal SB, Shukla PK, Mirjalili S, Kumar M (2022) A novel routing protocol based on grey wolf optimization and Q learning for wireless body area network. Expert Syst Appl 210:118477
Roshini A, Kiran KVD (2023) Hierarchical energy efficient secure routing protocol for optimal route selection in wireless body area networks. Int J Intell Netw 4:19–28
Takabayashi K, Tanaka H, Sugimoto C, Sakakibara K, Kohno R (2018) Performance evaluation of a quality of service control scheme in multi-hop WBAN based on IEEE 802.15. 6. Sensors 18(11):3969
Funding
No funding was received for conducting this study.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
A.A contributed to conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, software, investigation, validation, resources, writing—original draft, review & editing, visualization, resources, and writing—review & editing.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The author declares that have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Abdullah, A.M. An efficient energy-aware and reliable routing protocol to enhance the performance of wireless body area networks. J Supercomput 80, 14773–14798 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-024-06039-3
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-024-06039-3