Trust and Thermal Aware Routing Protocol (TTRP) for Wireless Body Area Networks

Recent advancements in wireless communication have made it possible to use low-power invasive or non-invasive sensor nodes to remotely monitor patients through wireless body area networks (WBANs). However, reliable and secure data transmission in WBANs is a challenging task. The issues such as privacy and confidentiality of patient related data require the reliable and secure data routing so that data can be kept safe from the malicious nodes. On the other hand, conventional biometric and cryptographic algorithms cannot be used in WBANs as they are, most of the time, complex and do not consider the misbehaving nature of nodes. Moreover, wireless nature of in vivo biomedical sensor nodes produces electromagnetic radiations which result in increased temperature; that could be harmful particularly for sensitive tissues. Therefore, trust and temperature based lightweight and resource efficient solutions are ultimate pre-requisite for WBAN. In this paper, we propose a trust and thermal-aware routing protocol for WBANs that considers trust among and temperature of nodes to isolate misbehaving nodes. This multi-facet routing strategy helps in providing a trusted and balanced network environment and restricts hotspot/misbehaving nodes to be part of trusted routes. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol performs better in terms of packet drop ratio, packet delay, throughput and temperature under varying traffic conditions as compared other state-of-art schemes.