Link quality and energy utilization based preferable next hop selection routing for wireless body area networks

The rising population and cost of medical services triggered the new technologies including Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) based on smart and intelligent biosensors nodes for sensing and monitoring the patient vital signs. The biosensor nodes have implanted inside or outside the human body to send the medical information to medical centers. For data dissemination in these services, different types of solutions and model have been designed to address the interference, body movement, disconnection quality of services issues in the network. This paper presents an Energy Aware Routing (EAR) protocol to minimize energy utilization and select preferable next hop by evaluating the link quality of sensor nodes. The proposed protocol evaluates the energy level, link quality, and remaining energy level to balance the load, minimize the energy utilization, and enhance the data transmission. Various simulations have conducted to evaluate the proposed protocols performance in terms of energy consumption, data delivery, delay, and data throughput. Experimental results indicated that the proposed protocol has a better mechanism for date routing and better solution to minimize the energy of sensor nodes in WBANs.