A priority-based congestion-avoidance routing protocol using IoT-based heterogeneous medical sensors for energy efficiency in healthcare wireless body area networks

A wireless body area network is a collection of Internet of Things–based wearable heterogeneous computing devices primarily used in healthcare monitoring applications. A lot of research is in process to reduce the cost and increase efficiency in medical industry. Low power sensor nodes are often attached to high-risk patients for real-time remote monitoring. These sensors have limited resources such as storage capacity, battery life, computational power, and channel bandwidth. The current work proposes a multi-hop Priority-based Congestion-avoidance Routing Protocol using IoT based heterogeneous sensors for energy efficiency in wireless body area networks. The objective is to devise a routing protocol among sensor nodes such that it has minimum delay and higher throughput for emergency packets using IoT based sensor nodes, optimal energy consumption for longer network lifetime, and efficient scarce resource utilization. In our proposed work, data traffic is categorized into normal and emergency or life-critical data. For normal data traffic, next-hop selection will be selected based upon three parameters; residual energy, congestion on forwarder node, and signal-to-noise ratio of the path between source and forwarder node. We use the data aggregation and filtration technique to reduce the network traffic load and energy consumption. A priority-based routing scheme is also proposed for life-critical data to have less delay and greater throughput in emergency situations. Performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated with two cutting-edge routing techniques iM-SIMPLE and Optimized Cost Effective and Energy Efficient Routing. The proposed model outperforms in terms of network throughput, traffic load, energy consumption, and lifespan.