An energy efficient on-demand multi-path routing protocol for wireless body area network

Wireless body area network (WBAN) makes a remarkable contribution to healthcare. However, WBAN is faced with problems such as energy shortage and radiation safety. The existing researches on WBAN routing protocol tend to focus on energy saving, but ignore other problems. Therefore, in this paper, an energy efficient on-demand multi-path routing protocol for WBAN is proposed to prolong the network lifetime while ensuring the user's radiation security and quality of service (QoS). Firstly, a cost function is constructed, which linearly combines the node residual energy ratio, the specific absorption rate (SAR), the buffer remaining space ratio and the node movement metric parameters. Secondly, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is adopted to calculate the weight vector of the cost function. Thirdly, the standard ad hoc on-demand multi-path distance vector protocol (AOMDV) is used as the base routing protocol and its routing mechanism is tuned to meet WBAN performance requirements using the cost function provided. Simulation results show that the revised routing protocol has better performance in terms of network throughput, average end-to-end delay and energy efficiency in a variety of simulation scenarios.