W-GeoR: Weighted Geographical Routing for VANET’s Health Monitoring Applications in Urban Traffic Networks
Pawan Singh, Ram Shringar Raw, Suhel Ahmad Khan, Mazin Abed Mohammed, Ayman A. Aly, Dac‐Nhuong Le
Abstract
Natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunami could destroy the existing infrastructure-based communication system. IoT-based health monitoring is not possible in such scenarios. Therefore, there is a need for other resilient health monitoring frameworks to provide consistent health monitoring without depending on existing communication platforms. Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) based health monitoring utilizing Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) as a communication medium could be a handy solution for transmitting patients’ health information to the nearest ambulance or hospital in emergencies or disaster-prone areas. Casualty rates can be reduced significantly by providing emergency treatment to injured patients within a stipulated time. VANET’s health monitoring applications are time-critical; therefore, designing a stable and efficient routing algorithm is a significant research challenge. Over the years, the researchers proposed many routing solutions to minimize the delay for critical applications. This paper proposed a Weighted Geographical Routing (W-GeoR) for VANET’s health monitoring applications focusing on next-hop node selection for faster vital signs dissemination to facilitate post-disaster health monitoring in urban traffic environments. The proposed protocol utilized traffic-aware information including traffic mobility, inter-vehicle distances, speed differences, communication link expiration time, channel quality, and proximity factors for optimal next-hop node selection procedure. W-GeoR is tested on a post-disaster scenario created with SUMO-0.32 and NS-3.23 platforms. Simulated results confirm that W-GeoR performs better than the existing state-of-the-art protocols.