Robust and Efficient Energy Aware Multihop Routing Protocol With CH Selection Approach in Wireless Body Area Networks

ABSTRACT A wireless body area network (WBAN) interconnects computer devices and sensing devices through wireless communication links. WBAN avails continuous communication and support in the fields of sports, entertainment, and remote health monitoring, due to its flexibility, real‐time data support, and monitoring. Recent innovations in WBAN focus on improving the communication quality in terms of delay and energy. Even though a lot of clustering‐based routing models have been established in WBAN research, identifying the quality nodes through optimization algorithms can be further improved considering multiple objectives. In this work, an efficient multihop routing inspired by an intelligent hybrid heuristic clustering algorithm is developed for achieving a high‐quality transmission path in WBAN. Initially, the cluster groups are generated, where the cluster head (CH) selection is overlooked by the newly developed hybrid emperor penguins colony‐based dolphin pod optimization algorithm (HEPC‐DOA). An objective function considering the WBAN constraints including residual energy, inter‐ and intra‐cluster distance, and delay is mainly considered for the optimal CH selection. Also, a multihop routing path is generated with the support of a developed HEPC‐DOA. Again, the designed optimal path satisfies the objectives like distance, energy, number of hops, transmission rate, data flow, path loss, packet reception rate, throughput, and delay. As both the CH selection and the routing path are done under an intelligent optimization technique, the WBAN ensures achieving improved packet reception rate, maximum throughput ratio, minimal delay, and better network lifetime. The developed multihop routing protocol with the proposed HEPC‐DOA is compared with conventional routing protocols to prove its efficacy and the comparative results indicate that the developed HEPC‐DOA procedure has achieved optimal solutions through its strong exploration rate, and improved the overall system throughput at 94.1%.