THE (Temperature Heterogeneity Energy) Aware Routing Protocol for IoT Health Application

In this paper, we focus on an interesting E-Health monitoring system that efficiently utilizes the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT). Wireless body area network (WBAN) composed of a set of target-oriented sensors placed around the human body and transmit its collected data to a coordinator that carries it to some cloud system. WBAN standardized with the newly emerged IEEE802.15.6 with its specifications for Physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers only. Regrettably, the Network layer is not addressed by the standard where it plays an important role in the overall performance. In this paper, we design the temperature heterogeneity energy (THE) aware routing protocol for WBAN as a complement for the standard. “THE” aims to control the temperature raising caused by the on-body sensor and affects the skin comfortableness. In the meantime, “THE” maintains the network in high-performance conditions in terms of long node lifetime and high packet throughput. To fulfill these desired tradeoffs, the sensed data is classified into three data levels with variable transmission priority to each level, namely, emergency (abnormal) data priority 7 (highest priority), critical data priority 6, and normal data assigned priority 5. “THE” protocol is based on a utility function that chooses the WBAN’s parent node (PN) that has the largest amount of remaining energy, the highest data rate, the minimum distance to the coordinator, and the minimum sensor’s temperature. Hopping the data through the parent node (two-hops) is applicable for the data with normal priority while high priority data (critical and emergency) is transmitted to the coordinator in one-hop only. The proposed “THE” protocol’s performance validation performed via Monte Carlo simulation analysis which proves that “THE” protocol achieved better performance against conventional protocols (SIMPLE and iM-SIMPLE) in terms of network lifetime, number of dead nodes, total remaining energy, and throughput.