Medium Access Control Protocol - based Energy and Quality of Service routing scheme for WBAN

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is gaining significant popularity due to its applications in smart health. It facilitates efficient, cost-effective, ubiquitous, and unobtrusive remote e-health monitoring. Similar to other networks such as Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and Ad-hoc Network, WBAN challenges include Postural Body Movement, Temperature Rise and Interference, Network Lifetime, and QoS. However, due to its stricter resource constrains in terms of transmit power and environmental requirement especially for nodes implanted in the body, an energy and Quality of Service aware routing protocol was developed in this paper. The algorithm decreases the frequent recharging and replacing of sensors nodes. The routing protocol works as follows: first, the sensor node senses the data and the data is classified into emergency, low-emergency and normal data by a Modified-MAC protocol referred to as M-MAC. Next, the emergency data is transmitted using single-hop transmission in order to deliver the data in on time, normal data is not transmitted so as to save energy and the low-emergency data is transmitted using another new developed algorithm called Weight-based optimal energy and QoS algorithm (W-QoS) which select the optimal route to send the data to the sink node. By enabling W-QoS to transmit low-emergency data, network lifetime and QoS is improved. This work is validated by comparing the network lifetime, delay and through to that of similar works, and our work outperforms all similar works. The performance was evaluated using OMNeT++ simulation environment.