Energy-Efficient and Congestion-Thermal Aware Routing Protocol for WBAN

Abstract

For remote health monitoring, activity tracking, and other applications in healthcare such as sports, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have become a feasible technology. However, the limited resources and dynamic nature of WBANs pose significant challenges to designing efficient and reliable routing protocols. To address these challenges, the proposed work suggests a thermal-aware, energy-efficient, and congestion-aware routing protocol (TECRP) for WBAN. TECRP focuses on improving transmission in both inter-WBAN and intra-WBAN scenarios. It addresses three key Quality of Service (QoS) parameters: energy efficiency, node temperature, and congestion, aiming to enhance overall WBAN communication efficiency. To achieve all these parameters, the algorithm is considered a multi-objective problem. The analysis shows that the temperature rises and delay increases with the number of data transmission, but the multi-objective approach helps to mitigate such effects. The result analysis shows that the path loss values fluctuate with increasing data transmission and network traffic. But the temperature rise increases with more data transmission and larger packets. On the other hand, the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) decreases with an increase in data transmission and with larger packet sizes. This shows that with higher congestion ratios, a higher likelihood of packet loss is seen. But in overall performance, the proposed TECRP shows better efficiency and congestion management as compared to other existing state-of-art-models and achieves high PDR, and minimizes packet loss. The proposed approach shows 0.42% improvement in energy efficiency as compared to existing approaches.