Journal Article

Reliable traffic prioritization routing protocol for wireless body area network

Abdelmaboud, Abdelzahir, Muchtar, Farkhana, Saidu, Abubakar, Elshafie, Hashim, Isyaku, Babangida, Abu Bakar, Kamalrulnizam

2026

Overview

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.

• Publisher: PeerJ, Inc,PeerJ Inc
• Subject: Access control / Algorithms / Binary data / Body area networks / Computing time / Data compression / Data processing / Delay / Design / Energy consumption / Energy efficiency / Internet of things / Intra body area network / Network latency / Optimization / Performance enhancement / Physiology / Priority scheduling / Queueing / Real time / Residual energy / Routing (telecommunications) / Scheduling / Sensors / Slot allocation / Traffic prioritization / Wireless body area network / Wireless networks