Data-Centric Load and QoS-Aware Body-to-Body Network Routing Protocol for Mass Casualty Incident

Abstract

Triage is the most important requirement of Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) where monitoring the vital signs of casualty is the crucial aspect to assess the severity of their current medical conditions. One of the most significant challenges in the triage center is to provide effective remote monitoring of vital signs of mass casualties. To overcome this challenge, there is a necessity to design a dynamic routing protocol that supports data-centric quality parameters such as delay and reliability as well network-specific quality parameters such as throughput and network lifetime over an ad hoc network. The proposed protocol handles data-centric quality parameters by jointly considering the link and node cost of the neighboring nodes. Further, the protocol handles network-specific quality parameters by including load distribution along with buffer management based on the medical condition of the casualties and beaconless routing mechanism. Furthermore, the proposed approach focuses on the transmission of vital signs of critical casualties while also avoiding network congestion and extending network lifespan. The experimentation results show that the proposed protocol is efficient in handling end-to-end delay, the packet transmission ratio of the critical casualties vital signs as compared to the existing state-of-the-art approaches.

Keywords

• QoS provisioning
• load balancing
• network congestion
• routing protocols
• wireless body area networks
• body-to-body networks