An Adaptive Intelligent Thermal-Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive routing protocol for WBANs that considers temperature and reliability, significantly improving network performance and energy efficiency while avoiding overheating of nodes.

Contribution

It presents a novel temperature-aware, reliability-based routing protocol with dynamic traffic management tailored for WBANs, enhancing performance and node safety.

Findings

Improves throughput by 13%

Reduces delay by 10%

Decreases energy consumption by 25%

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have gained significant attention due to their applications in healthcare monitoring, sports, military communication, and remote patient care. These networks consist of wearable or implanted sensors that continuously collect and transmit physiological data, requiring efficient and reliable communication. However, WBANs face challenges such as limited energy, dynamic topology, and sensitivity to node temperature, which demand specialized routing strategies. Traditional shortest-path routing often causes congestion and overheating in specific nodes, leading to early failures. To address these problems, this paper proposes an intelligent temperature-aware and reliability-based routing approach that enhances WBAN performance. The proposed method works in two phases: (1) network setup and intelligent path selection, and (2) dynamic traffic management and hotspot avoidance. In the first phase, nodes share information such as residual energy, temperature, link reliability, and delay to build an optimized topology using a multi-criteria decision algorithm. The second phase continuously monitors real-time conditions and reroutes traffic away from overheated or depleted nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed approach improves throughput by 13 percent, reduces end-to-end delay by 10 percent, decreases energy consumption by 25 percent, and lowers routing load by 30 percent compared to existing methods.