A Survey of Routing Protocols in Wireless Body Area Networks for Healthcare Applications

Recent advances in electronics and integrated circuits have fostered the development of small and intelligent medical sensors and actuators that are wearable or implementable inside the human body. The main function of these devices is to collect patient’s physiological parameters and forward them to the medical center in an efficient and reliable way. Therefore, routing is a non-trivial task in wireless body area networks (WBAN); sensing the importance of routing in WBAN and the availability of a significant body of literature on this topic are the main motivations that encourage the study and examination of routing mechanisms. This paper proposes WBAN routing approaches. It outlines the design challenges for WBAN routing protocols and sketches out the communication architecture of this type of network. The authors’ main contribution is the classification of the routing techniques into six main categories, which corresponds to thermal aware routing protocols, cluster based routing protocols, cross layers based routing protocols, quality of service (QoS) aware routing protocols, and delay tolerant aware routing protocols. The advantages and performance issues of each routing technique are highlighted. This paper is useful for researchers to make enhancements to the future design of WBAN routing protocols and algorithms.