SIMOF: swarm intelligence multi-objective fuzzy thermal-aware routing protocol for WBANs

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a wireless communication technology which facilitates the medical staff to remotely monitor and provide accurate treatment to patients. Wireless body sensors are resource constrained, and consequently, an efficient routing protocol is vital in the design of these networks. Although many protocols have been presented for the routing in WBANs, sufficient features have not been adequately addressed in these techniques. Moreover, parameters of these protocols are manually set and remain constant in all applications, i.e., no automatic tuning procedure is applied to tune the protocol based on the application requirements. To overcome these drawbacks, we introduce a swarm intelligence multi-objective fuzzy protocol (named SIMOF), as a tunable routing protocol in WBANs. The SIMOF comprises two phases, namely fuzzy inference system (FIS) and automatic rule tuning using whale optimization algorithm (WOA). The FIS utilizes a multi-objective fuzzy inference system based on residual energy, distance, reliability, bandwidth, temperature, path loss, and estimated energy consumption, to select proper relay nodes, considering IEEE 802.15.6 standard. To achieve the best performance in the SIMOF, Mamdani rules of the FIS are automatically tuned using WOA. Simulations over three WBANs demonstrate the superiority of the proposed SIMOF routing protocol against the existing techniques in terms of the stability period, path loss, reliability, and hotspot temperature.