Internet of Health Things (IoHT) involves intelligent, low-powered, and miniaturized sensors nodes that measure physiological signals and report them to sink nodes over wireless links. IoHTs have a myriad of applications in e-health and personal health monitoring. Because of the data’s sensitivity measured by the nodes and power-constraints of the sensor nodes, reliability and energy-efficiency play a critical role in communication in IoHT. Reliability is degraded by the increase in packets’ loss due to inefficient MAC, routing protocols, environmental interference, and body shadowing. Simultaneously, inefficient node selection for routing may cause the depletion of critical nodes’ energy resources. Recent advancements in cross-layer protocol optimizations have proven their efficiency for packet-based Internet. In this article, we propose a MAC/Routing-based Cross-layer protocol for reliable communication while preserving the sensor nodes’ energy resource in IoHT. The proposed mechanism employs a timer-based strategy for relay node selection. The timer-based approach incorporates the metrics for residual energy and received signal strength indicator to preserve the vital underlying resources of critical sensors in IoHT. The proposed approach is also extended for multiple sensor networks, where sensor in vicinity are coordinating and cooperating for data forwarding. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated for metrics like Packet Loss Probability, End-To-End delay, and energy used per data packet. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed technique improves the reliability and energy-efficiency compared to the Simple Opportunistic Routing protocol.

中文翻译：

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跨层MAC /路由协议，用于健康物联网中的可靠通信

健康物联网（IoHT）涉及智能，低功耗和小型化的传感器节点，这些节点可测量生理信号并通过无线链路将其报告给下沉节点。IoHT在电子医疗和个人健康监控中有无数的应用。由于通过节点测量的数据敏感度和传感器节点的功率约束，可靠性和能效在IoHT的通信中起着至关重要的作用。由于MAC效率低下，路由协议，环境干扰和身体遮蔽而导致的数据包丢失增加，可靠性降低了。同时，路由选择的节点选择效率低下，可能会导致关键节点的能源耗尽。跨层协议优化的最新进展证明了它们对于基于分组的Internet的效率。在这篇文章中，我们提出了一种基于MAC /路由的跨层协议，以实现可靠的通信，同时在IoHT中保留传感器节点的能源。所提出的机制采用基于定时器的策略来选择中继节点。基于计时器的方法结合了剩余能量的度量和接收信号强度指示器，以保留IoHT中关键传感器的重要基础资源。所提出的方法还扩展到了多个传感器网络，其中附近的传感器正在协调和合作进行数据转发。针对诸如数据包丢失概率，端到端延迟和每个数据包使用的能量等指标评估了所提出技术的性能。大量的仿真结果表明，与简单机会路由协议相比，该技术提高了可靠性和能效。