Fuzzy Control-Based Energy-Aware Routing Protocol For Wireless Body Area Networks

Advances in medical and communication technologies have empowered the development of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). WBANs interconnect with miniature sensors placed on the human body to enable medical monitoring of patient health. However, the limited battery capacity, delay, and reliability of data transmission have brought challenges to the wider application of WBAN. Minimum consumption of energy and maximum satisfaction with the QoS requirements are essential design aims of the WBAN schemes. Therefore, a fuzzy control-based energy-aware routing protocol (EARP) is proposed in this paper, the proposed protocol establishes a fuzzy control model composed of remaining node energy and link quality, and the best forwarder node is determined by the processes of fuzzification, fuzzy inference, and defuzzification. The simulation results showed that compared with the performance of the existing EERDT and M-TSIMPLE protocols, the proposed EARP has better performance, including extending network lifetime and improving the reliability of data transmission.