Energy constraint-aware routing protocol for data transmission in ad hoc medical care networks

This paper proposes a novel routing protocol called Energy Constraint-Aware Routing Protocol (ECAR) for data transmission in Mobile Ad hoc Medical Care Networks (MAMCN). MAMCN is a sophisticated network environment where multiple types of mobile devices are involved, employing different forms of data transmission without a pre-defined infrastructure. Besides common data, images and "big data" are also significant contributors to the hop-by-hop transmissions. Given the real-time energy status of every node in MAMCN, the route selection scheme proposed in ECAR not only treats the application data differently, but also involves a distributed image compression mechanism as part of the overall design goal, that is prolonging whole network's lifetime. Simulation results show that ECAR out performs other routing protocols greatly in the challenging MAMCN environment.