Energy-Efficient Protocol Design for Wearable Healthcare IoT Devices

Abdullah, Ibrahim; Raj, Ahmed

doi:10.25673/123725

Proceedings of International Conference on Applied Innovation in IT · 2026/03/31 · Vol. 14 · Issue 1 · pp. 1247–1254

Energy-Efficient Protocol Design for Wearable Healthcare IoT Devices

Ibrahim N. Abdullah, Ahmed Ali Ibrahim and Gaurav Raj

📄 Download PDF DOI: 10.25673/123725

Abstract

The increased need to maintain constant and real-time measurements of health has driven the use of Wearable Healthcare Internet of Things (WH-IoT) systems. Nevertheless, wearable devices have a significant drawback in the form of energy limitations, which limits their ability to operate sustainably especially in resource scarce conditions. In this paper, an energy-efficient communication protocol optimized to operate on WH-IoT and aimed at minimizing power consumption and ensuring data integrity, low latency and high reliability is presented. The suggested model combines adaptive sleep-wake scheduling, signal-aware duty cycling, and a lightweight MAC scheduling strategy, which are coordinated by a centralized gateway and cloud-based health analytics platform. The simulation findings reveal that the proposed protocol has better performance with respect to the current standards that use variation of power consumption like IEEE 802.15.4, B-MAC, and T-MAC in such important metrics like the average power consumption, packet delivery ratio (PDR), end-to-end delay, and network lifetime. A comparative analysis in details proves that the protocol is suitable to be used in the most important medical tools when the energy efficiency is crucial together with the real time responsiveness. The system is also scalable and robust thus a good option to implement in new smart healthcare ecosystems in the future.

Keywords

Wearable Healthcare IoT Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) Energy-Efficient Protocol MAC Scheduling Sleep-Wake Mechanism Packet Delivery Ratio Network Lifetime Real-time Health Monitoring Low-Power IoT Smart Medical Devices.

References

M. Chen, S. Gonzalez, A. Vasilakos, H. Cao, and V. C. Leung, “Body area networks: A survey,” Mobile Networks and Applications, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 171-193, 2011.
S. H. Almotiri, M. A. Khan, and M. A. Alghamdi, “Mobile health (m-health) system in the context of IoT,” in 2016 IEEE 4th International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud Workshops (FiCloudW), pp. 39-42, IEEE, 2016.
H. M. Kaidi, M. A. M. Izhar, R. A. Dziyauddin, N. E. Shaiful, and R. Ahmad, “A comprehensive review on wireless healthcare monitoring: System components,” IEEE Access, vol. 12, pp. 35008-35032, 2024.
G. Fortino, R. Gravina, and S. Galzarano, Wearable Computing: From Modeling to Implementation of Wearable Systems Based on Body Sensor Networks, John Wiley & Sons, 2018.
S. R. Islam, D. Kwak, M. H. Kabir, M. Hossain, and K. S. Kwak, “The internet of things for health care: a comprehensive survey,” IEEE Access, vol. 3, pp. 678-708, 2015.
Y. Ding, H. Xu, M. Zhao, H. Liang, and Y. Wang, “Group authentication and key distribution for sensors in wireless body area network,” International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, vol. 17, no. 9, 2021.
S. S. Hameed, W. H. Hassan, L. A. Latiff, and F. Ghabban, “A systematic review of security and privacy issues in the internet of medical things; the role of machine learning approaches,” PeerJ Computer Science, vol. 7, p. e414, 2021.
B. Latré, B. Braem, I. Moerman, C. Blondia, and P. Demeester, “A survey on wireless body area networks,” Wireless Networks, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 1-18, 2011.
S. Hayat, N. Javaid, Z. A. Khan, A. Shareef, A. Mahmood, and S. H. Bouk, “Energy efficient MAC protocols,” in 2012 IEEE 14th International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communication & 2012 IEEE 9th International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems, pp. 1185-1192, IEEE, 2012.
N. Javaid, S. Hayat, M. Shakir, M. A. Khan, S. H. Bouk, and Z. A. Khan, “Energy efficient MAC protocols in wireless body area sensor networks-a survey,” arXiv preprint, arXiv:1303.2072, 2013, [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.2072.
S. J. Marinkovic, E. M. Popovici, C. Spagnol, S. Faul, and W. P. Marnane, “Energy-efficient low duty cycle MAC protocol for wireless body area networks,” IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 915-925, 2009.
W. B. Qaim, A. Ometov, A. Molinaro, I. Lener, C. Campolo, E. S. Lohan, and J. Nurmi, “Towards energy efficiency in the internet of wearable things: A systematic review,” IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 175412-175435, 2020.
R. Gravina and G. Fortino, “Wearable body sensor networks: state-of-the-art and research directions,” IEEE Sensors Journal, vol. 21, no. 11, pp. 12511-12522, 2020.
A. M. Rahmani, N. K. Thanigaivelan, T. N. Gia, J. Granados, B. Negash, P. Liljeberg, and H. Tenhunen, “Smart e-health gateway: Bringing intelligence to internet-of-things based ubiquitous healthcare systems,” in 2015 12th Annual IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), pp. 826-834, IEEE, 2015.
F. Ghavimi and H. H. Chen, “M2M communications in 3GPP LTE/LTE-A networks: Architectures, service requirements, challenges, and applications,” IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 525-549, 2014.
M. Mahmood, K. Y. Kamal, and S. S. Hussein, “Monitoring Indoor Air Quality Using Low-Cost IoT,” Journal of Techniques, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 21-28, 2025, [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.51173/jt.v7i2.1987.
R. H. Ahmed and A. S. Nouri, “Enhanced Transient Stability in Power Systems via Intelligent Control of SVCs Using Neural Networks,” Electrical Engineering Technical Journal, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 17-24, 2025, [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.51173/eetj.v2i2.23.