Ad Hoc Networks 42 (2016) 1–18 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ad Hoc Networks journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/adhoc A Priority based Cross Layer Routing Protocol for healthcare applications Hadda Ben Elhadj a,∗ , Jocelyne Elias b , Lamia Chaari a , Lotfi Kamoun a a LETI Laboratory, Sfax University, Tunisia b LIPADE Laboratory, Université Paris Descartes – Sorbonne Paris Cité, 75006 Paris, France a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 28 February 2015 Revised 9 October 2015 Accepted 20 October 2015 Available online 2 November 2015 Keywords: Wireless Body Area Networks Healthcare QoS MAC Cross layer Routing a b s t r a c t Wireless body area networks (WBANs) represent one of the most promising approaches for improving the quality of life, allowing remote patient monitoring and other healthcare ap- plications. Data dissemination and medium access in a WBAN are critical issues that impact the network reliability, the efficiency and the total energy consumed by the network. In this paper, we propose a Priority-based Cross Layer Routing Protocol (PCLRP) along with a Priority Cross Layer Medium Access Channel protocol (PCLMAC) for healthcare applications. PCLRP combined with PCLMAC ensures reliable traffic dissemination and customized channel access for intra- and inter-body communications. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves customized quality of services and outperforms state of the art existing pro- tocols in terms of power consumption, packet delivery ratio and delay. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The increase in average lifespan and health costs along with the advances in miniaturization of electronic devices, sensing, battery and wireless communication technologies have led to the development of wireless body area networks (WBANs). In the health field, a WBAN consists of a set of medical sensors (i.e., ECG, EEG) and a coordinator (personal digital assistant (PDA) or a smart phone) implanted in or on the user’s body [1–4]. These devices aim to collect, store and process patient’s physiological parameters and provide him ubiquitous healthcare services. Due to their specific proper- ties such as small size, data rate, reliability, security, mobil- ity, power constraint, QoS requirements, and heterogeneous traffic, WBANs require special protocols design to meet their particular needs. In other words, although WBANs derive ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +21625369105. E-mail addresses: Hadda.Ibnelhadj@esti.rnu.tn (H. Ben Elhadj), jocelyne.elias@parisdescartes.fr (J. Elias), lamia.chaari@enis.rnu.tn (L. Chaari), Lotif.kamoun@isecs.rnu.tn (L. Kamoun). somehow from WSNs, there are intrinsic differences between these two networks (which are summarized in Table 1). Ever since WBANs have emerged, different optimization schemes have been proposed to overcome the above chal- lenging issues. Cross-layer approaches have proven to provide better WBAN optimization results than their layered counterparts [7]. Indeed, layer cooperation in cross-layer based schemes well enhances the overall WBAN performance. For instance, in a cross-layer scheme, the QoS requirements at the applica- tion layer can be communicated to the MAC layer in order to achieve better resource allocation for the running healthcare application. Furthermore, the channel state information and battery level can be fed to the network layer to avoid paths including channels in a bad state or depleted nodes. The great number of proposed WBAN cross-layer ap- proaches (reviewed in Section 2) proves that there is still a need for further optimization of such networks, and that cross-layering is efficient to accomplish that. From this point of view, this paper presents a Priority based Cross Layer Routing Protocol for healthcare applications, named PCLRP. PCLRP is an adaptive protocol in the sense of slot assignment http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2015.10.007 1570-8705/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.