Intra WBAN routing using Zipf’s law and intelligent transmission power switching approach (ZITA)

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are becoming a popular and convenient mechanism for IoT-based health monitoring applications. Maintaining the energy efficiency of the nodes in WBANs without degrading network performance is one of the crucial factors for the success of this paradigm. Obtaining routes for data packets should be a dynamic decision depending on network conditions. Consequently, in this paper, a novel cost-based routing protocol ZITA has been proposed that addresses primary issues of WBAN routing, such as timeliness, link quality, temperature control, and energy efficiency while finding the next hop for data packets. Zipf's law is applied for relay selection to ensure the distribution of forwarding load among the potential relays. ZITA controls the transmission power level adaptively in order to cope with the timevarying channel conditions following multi-hop architecture. The protocol is simulated and the results show that the protocol gives better performance in terms of data received by the sink, heat dissipation of the wearable as well as implantable sensor nodes, and load sharing among relay nodes.