Quality of Service Position based Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN)s are gaining popularity, as real-time diagnosis and electronic therapy of patients are two key components driving the healthcare field. In addition to the digital technologies involved in this diagnosis, such as the Internet of Things (IoT). The importance of this network appeared during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which patients can treated remotely when the risk of infection spread is high. Besides "traditional" applications such as military, and sports training. Routing in WBAN networks remains a key issue since without properly functioning routing protocols. Unfortunately, routing may also be one of the most difficult areas to protect patients in critical situations. This is due to the high probability of delay and link failure, since the nature of the human body movement and thus changing the location of the network parts. With the wide spread of WBANs, the need for quality of serving their routing protocols emerges as a very important issue that is not easy to tackle. Many of the demands of network Quality of Service (QoS) conflict with the demands of mobility nodes in the network due to the nature of the body movement (e.g., low power consumption and low processing load). The concept and structure of WBAN make them highly prone to network failure several techniques that consume more energy, increase delay, and decrease the reliability of data. Our research has focused on the reliability and latency of services provided by static or mobile nodes. Our newly proposed protocol is a hybrid QoS Position-based Routing protocol (QPR) tries to save network bandwidth and nodes memory in WBANs that introducing a classification of data priority and nodes mobility (QPR). QPR classifies the type of data sensed as critical or normal. When data is critical and nodes are static, data directly transmitted to the sink to guarantee low latency. Additionally, it tries to improve network reliability by employing a multipath strategy when the data is critical and the nodes are mobile. The performance of QPR has compared to two other existing routing protocols: we chose the Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV), because the researchers used it as a benchmark in research. Another protocol we chose the Multipath Rings Routing (MPRR), because is a new protocol that gives good performance in addition the implementation code is available in our simulator. After studying the previous protocols, we conclude that AODV provides an efficient route in normal traffic without consideration of a dynamic change of position of the node. However, it fails when the data is critical with mobility occurs. The MPRR achieves a reasonable level of mobility, but it needs high overhead and the need for extra delay. This comparison has been conducting using the OMNeT++/Castalia simulator. Simulation results showed that the QPR protocol improves reliability by around 54% and around 19% latency compared with AODV. In addition, improves reliability by around 19%, and around 17% latency compared with MPRR, considering high nodes mobility, a large number of nodes and a large percentage of critical data sent between these nodes.