Reliable traffic prioritization routing protocol for wireless body area network

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are vital for real-time healthcare monitoring. However, existing protocols either overlooked traffic prioritization or rely on approaches that introduces performance drawbacks; multi-hop routing that delay emergency transmission, time-slot allocation that increases latency, priority queue that ignores link quality and raises computational overheads while staving low-priority packets, deadline-based scheduling that triggers retransmissions, or complex data processing that further delay urgent responses. To overcome these limitations, this study introduces the Reliable Traffic Prioritization Scheme (RTPS), a lightweight routing protocol that dynamically prioritizes traffic based on urgency, optimized link selection, and balanced energy usage for long-term monitoring. RTPS employs binary data compression to reduce processing overhead, single-hop transmission for rapid delivery of critical data, and energy-efficient multi-hop routing for normal data using composite link quality metrics. Simulation results demonstrated that RTPS significantly enhanced performance compared to state-of-the-art protocols; Reliable Link Quality, Temperature and Delay Aware Routing (RLTD) and Temperature Aware and Energy-Efficient Routing (TAEERS). Specifically, RTPS reduced queueing delay by 47.47% and 97.9% over RLTD and TAEERS respectively and improved network lifetime by 14.3% over RLTD and more than triple that of TAEERS. It also increased residual energy by 67.35% over RLTD and more than fivefold over TAEERS. Furthermore, RTPS decreased end-to-end delay by 64.76% relative to RLTD, and minimized computational time by 99.95% over TAEERS.