Intelligent‐Routing Algorithm for wireless body area networks (I‐RAW)

Abstract

SummaryThe progressive strides in the exploration of sensing technology and the potential use of electrical devices have rendered a promising technology, termed as Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). This technology has rendered competency to reform healthcare and making available ubiquitous health care support to remotely located patients. However, the sensor nodes which are embedded on or underneath the body of the patients to measure multifaceted physiological parameters are suffered from the limited battery constraints. In this paper, to address this issue, we propose Intelligent‐Routing Algorithm for WBANs (I‐RAW) to elongate life period of these sensor nodes. The two sinks are located on the front and back side of the patient's body that collects data from the sensor nodes which form clusters and forward the data through the cluster head (CH). We apply Tunicate Swarm Algorithm (TSA) for selection of CH which considers the essential parameters namely, residual energy, network's average energy, distance of node from the sink, path loss model, and energy consumption rate. The use of two sinks in WBAN mitigate hot‐spot problem in the network by avoiding the multi‐hop communication. The simulation results show that I‐RAW improves stability period and network operational period by 37.7% and 42.7%, respectively, as compared to Dual Sink approach using Clustering in Body area network (DSCB) protocol, respectively. Further, I‐RAW also shows supreme performance for various performance metrics as compared to other state‐of‐the‐art protocols.