Abstract
The technological advancements in wireless communication and miniaturization of sensor nodes have resulted in the development of Wireless Medical Sensor Networks (WMSNs) which can be effectively used for remote patient monitoring. Remote patient monitoring is one such application of wireless sensor networks which is becoming increasingly prevalent in healthcare. The healthcare applications of the WMSNs are delay-sensitive and require timely delivery of patient-critical data. However, the frequent exchange of critical data packets results in higher delays, collisions, packet drop, and re-transmissions. Consequently, it brings a detrimental impact on the performance of the WMSNs. In addition, the implanted biomedical sensor nodes produce electromagnetic radiations, pose a serious threat of damaging sensitive tissues in the human body. Protecting tissue damage requires thermal-aware routing protocols. However, most of the thermal-aware routing protocols developed for the WBSNs primarily focused on minimizing temperature, while overlooking the energy conservation goal and optimization of route selection. In this paper, we propose a weighted, QoS-based, energy and temperature-aware routing protocol, referred to as (WETRP), for the WMSNs that utilizes a composite routing metric by keeping in view temperature, remaining node energy, and link-delay estimation during route selection decisions. The simulation results presented in the paper demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed scheme in terms of preventing temperature rise, dealing with hotspot nodes, and maximizing network's lifetime.