Metaheuristic based routing incorporated with energy harvesting for enhanced network lifetime in WBAN

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBAN) have improved healthcare industries to a large extent by providing contactless measurements and remote data analysis. However, the challenges encountered are mostly in the form of energy depletion scenarios, which results in the reduction of network lifetime to a large extent. This work presents an effective model to provide energy-efficient routing and enhanced energy harvesting mechanisms to improve network lifetime. The ant colony optimization (ACO) method has been extended to include a fitness function that takes into account several factors, and this is the basis for the routing model. These processes ensure effective routing, which conserves energy and, in turn, results in enhanced network lifetime. Performance of the proposed model has been compared with the existing state-of-the-art models in the domain. Comparison with the metaheuristic-based model, cooperative energy efficient and priority based reliable routing protocol with network coding (CEPRAN), indicates the efficiency of the energy harvesting mechanism used in the proposed work. When compared with models using energy harvesting mechanisms, results exhibit higher network lifetime, depicting the efficiency of the proposed routing mechanism.