A Taxonomy-Based Survey of Energy Efficiency, Security and Scalability Challenges in Wireless Body Area Network Routing Protocols

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is growing up technologies that enable continuous health monitoring by using wearable and implantable sensor nodes. Routing process in this network is challenging due to factors such as energy limitation of sensor nodes, the need to frequently transmit data, motion of human body and security constraints. Well-developed routing implementing above factors plays an important role in ensuring reliable communication, extended operation of the network, less delay and security in health care settings.
The current survey provides a thorough review of routing protocols in WBANs with major focusing on performance metrics parameters like energy efficiency, scalability and security. Many research articles from 2015 to 2025 are reviewed critically and differentiated based on techniques used for routing mechanism such as flat routing, hierarchical routing, cross layer routing, thermal aware routing, QoS aware routing and trust-based routing. Evaluation of the protocols is done based on parameters such as network lifetime, packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, throughput and energy consumption.
Comparative analysis done shows that hierarchical routing techniques can substantially increase the lifetime of the network whereas any other security measures generally require energy expenditure. However, it has been observed that currently available technologies have shown low scalability and degrade performance when there is some level of mobility and dynamism of the traffic. As per research gaps identified it is required to emphasize the necessity of using adaptive routing protocols, energy efficient security techniques and efficient methods for temperature regulation. The future directions of the research include the implementation of routing with the help of efficient inter-wban communication supporting federated learning, energy harvesting, and cryptography technologies.