An efficient energy aware routing mechanism for wireless body area networks

The accelerated development of wireless network technology has resulted in the emergence of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), which is a technology commonly used in the medical field. WBAN consists of tiny sensor nodes that interconnect with each other and set in the human body to collect and transmit the patient data to the physician, to monitor the patients remotely. These nodes typically have limited battery energy that led to a shortage of network lifetime. Therefore, energy efficiency is considered one of the most demanding challenges in routing design for WBAN. Many proposed routing mechanisms in WBAN did not cover the source node energy and energy harvesting techniques. Therefore, this study proposes an Efficient Energy Aware Routing (EEAR) mechanism. This paper constructs a path cost function that considers three parameters: residual energy, number of hops to the sink, and the distance between the nodes. Besides, data aggregation with filtration and hybrid energy harvesting technique are used to extend the network lifetime, reduce the network traffic load, and maintain the source node energy. Extensive simulations using MATLAB have been performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism. EEAR is contrasted with the two latest schemes, called Priority-based Congestion-avoidance Routing Protocol (PCRP) and Energy Efficient Routing Protocol (EERP). The results show the significant performance of the EEAR mechanism in terms of network lifetime, residual energy, network stability, and throughput.