An Insight on Optimization Techniques for Uncertain and Reliable Routing in Wireless Body Area Networks

In recent times, Wireless Body Area Networks a subsection of Wireless Sensor Network is a promising technology for future healthcare realm with cutting-edge technologies that can assist healthcare professionals like doctors, nurses and biomedical engineers. Machine Learning and Internet of Things enabled medical big data is the future of healthcare sector and Medical Technology-based industries leading to applications in other sectors such as fitness tracking for commercial purposes, Sportsperson health monitoring to track their day-to-day activities and wearable devices for critical and emergency care. This comprehensive review article addresses Wireless Body Area Network state-of-art and the dependence of Optimization Techniques and Meta-heuristic Algorithms for an efficient routing path between two sensor nodes: source node and destination node and it plays an effective role in optimizing the network parameters such as radio range, energy consumption, throughput, data aggregation, clustering and routing. Designing of energy-efficient routing for wireless body are network is such a challenging task due to uncertainty in dynamic network topology, energy constraints and limited power consumption. Optimization Techniques can help the researchers to achieve the drawbacks mentioned above and energy-efficiency of the network can be improved. In this article, we focus majorly on the efficiency of usage of optimization algorithms for Wireless Body Area Network routing mechanisms and a summary of its earlier studies during 2012-2023 epoch. Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization, Ant Colony Optimization, Artificial Bee Colony and Firefly Optimization algorithms were discussed on achieving local optima for better results through optimization. This article provides an insight into existing gaps and further modifications to the researchers in WBAN that can motivate them to propose new ideas for reliable solutions. Performance comparison and evaluation of different bio-inspired optimization algorithms has been discussed for further improvement in optimized routing algorithms.