An efficient energy-aware and reliable routing protocol to enhance the performance of wireless body area networks.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]