CPAOR: Control Packet Aware On-demand Routing Protocol for WBANs

Background and Objective: The core problem of wireless body area network (WBAN) nodes is their limited energy resource. Thus, an energy-efficient routing protocol is crucial to this type of network. A major drawback of current routing protocols is that they do not consider the monitoring of a large number of patients, which may be problematic in the event of disasters. In addition, most routing algorithms fail to consider balancing energy consumption between nodes. Furthermore, routing overhead (RO) and reduced complexity are required in this type of network. Methods: In this paper, we propose a control packet aware on-demand routing (CPAOR) protocol to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks. The proposed protocol decreases the number of control packets and adds awareness for the transmission of control packets, which can extend the network lifetime. Results and Discussion: We analyze and examine the simulation results of the CPAOR protocol using MATLAB in terms of energy consumption, the energy factor, RO, and changing the number of nodes to more than 60 nodes. The CPAOR protocol demonstrates an improvement of 70.9% compared to the DMQoS, ORACE-Net, and DLQoS protocols in terms of energy consumption. This finding proves that the CPAOR protocol is an efficient routing protocol for WBANs. Conclusion: The CPAOR protocol has been proven to be an effective routing protocol for WBANs.