Priority‐Based QoS Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

ABSTRACT With the progress of technology in the field of wireless communication, wireless body area networks (WBANs) have been introduced. WBANs consist of a number of intelligent biomedical sensor nodes and a special node called sink. Sensors are placed on the patient's body or under the skin, and their task is to check physiological parameters and report to the sink. The resources of these nodes are limited, and communication is subject to various issues. Maintaining the quality of communication due to the high importance of the transmitted data and severe limitations is one of the important issues in WBANs. The important challenge in this area is designing a framework for next‐hop node selection with covering the quality needs of the transmitted data. This paper proposes a Priority‐Based QoS Aware Routing Protocol for WBANs (PQARP). PQARP is a three‐step method. In the first step, the sensors are configured. In the second step, data is separated and marked. In the third step, the proposed PQARP routing is done and the most appropriate intermediate node is selected to send data. The simulation results using NS‐2 showed the remarkable capabilities of PQARP in covering quality requirements of different data sent and improving the metrics of end‐to‐end delay, successful delivery ratio, throughput and energy consumption compared to other similar methods.