The health industry is one of the most auspicious domains for the application of Internet of Things (IoT) based technologies. Lots of studies have been carried out in the health industry field to minimize the use of resources and increase the efficiency. The use of IoT combined with other technologies has brought quality advancement in the health sector at minimum expense. One such technology is the use of wireless body area networks (WBANs), which will help patients incredibly in the future and will make them more productive because there will be no need for staying at home or a hospital for a long time. WBANs and IoT have an integrated future as WBANs, like any IoT application, are a collection of heterogeneous sensor-based devices. For the better amalgamation of the IoT and WBANs, several hindrances blocking their integration need to be addressed. One such problem is the efficient routing of data in limited resource sensor nodes (SNs) in WBANs. To solve this and other problems, such as transmission of duplicate sensed data, limited network lifetime, etc., energy harvested and cooperative-enabled efficient routing protocol (EHCRP) for IoT-WBANs is proposed. The proposed protocol considers multiple parameters of WBANs for efficient routing such as residual energy of SNs, number of hops towards the sink, node congestion levels, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and available network bandwidth. A path cost estimation function is calculated to select forwarder node using these parameters. Due to the efficient use of the path-cost estimation process, the proposed mechanism achieves efficient and effective multi-hop routing of data and improves the reliability and efficiency of data transmission over the network. After extensive simulations, the achieved results of the proposed protocol are compared with state-of-the-art techniques, i.e., E-HARP, EB-MADM, PCRP and EERP. The results show significant improvement in network lifetime, network throughout, and end-to-end delay.
Keywords: IoT; WBAN; cooperative effort; efficient data transmission; energy harvesting; routing protocol.