Adaptive Relay-Assisted WBAN Protocol: Enhancing Energy Efficiency and QoS through Advanced Multi-Criteria Decision-Making

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is essential for continuous health monitoring. However, they face energy efficiency challenges due to the low power consumption of sensor nodes. Current WBAN routing protocols face limitations in strategically minimizing energy consumption during the retrieval of vital health parameters. Efficient network traffic management remains a challenge, with existing approaches often resulting in increased delay and reduced throughput. Additionally, insufficient attention has been paid to enhancing channel capacity to maintain signal strength and mitigate fading effects under dynamic and robust operating scenarios. Several routing strategies and procedures have been developed to effectively reduce communication-related energy consumption based on the selection of relay nodes. The relay node selection is essential for data transmission in WBAN. This paper introduces an Adaptive Relay-Assisted Protocol (ARAP) for WBAN, a hybrid routing protocol designed to optimize energy use and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics such as network longevity, latency, throughput, and residual energy. ARAP employs neutrosophic relay node selection techniques, including the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to optimally resolve data and decision-making uncertainties. The protocol was compared with existing protocols such as Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH), Modified-Adaptive Threshold Testing and Evaluation Methodology for Performance Testing (M-ATTEMPT), Wireless Adaptive Sampling Protocol (WASP), and Tree-Based Multicast Quality of Service (TMQoS). The comparative results show that the ARAP significantly outperformed these protocols in terms of network longevity and energy efficiency. ARAP has lower communication cost, better throughput, reduced delay, increased network lifetime, and enhanced residual energy. The simulation results indicate that the proposed approach performed better than the conventional methods, with 68%, 62%, 25%, and 50% improvements in network longevity, residual energy, throughput, and latency, respectively. This significantly improves the functional lifespan of WBAN and makes them promising candidates for sophisticated health monitoring systems.