The emergence of wireless body area network (WBAN) technology has brought hope and dawn to solve the problems of population aging, various chronic diseases, and medical facility shortage. The increasing demand for real-time applications in such networks, stimulates many research activities. Designing such a scheme of critical events while preserving the energy efficiency is a challenging task, due to the dynamic of the network topology, severe constraints on the power supply, and the limited computation power. The design of routing protocols becomes an essential part of WBANs and plays an important role in the communication stacks and has a significant impact on the network performance. In this paper, we briefly introduce WBAN and focus on the analysis of the routing protocol, classify, and compare the advantages and disadvantages of various routing protocols. Lastly, we put forward some problems and suggestions, which provides ideas for the follow-up routing design.

Advances in medical and communication technologies have empowered the development of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). WBANs interconnect with miniature sensors placed on the human body to enable medical monitoring of patient health. However, the limited battery capacity, delay, and reliability of data transmission have brought challenges to the wider application of WBAN. Minimum consumption of energy and maximum satisfaction with the QoS requirements are essential design aims of the WBAN schemes. Therefore, a fuzzy control‐based energy‐aware routing protocol (EARP) is proposed in this paper, the proposed protocol establishes a fuzzy control model composed of remaining node energy and link quality, and the best forwarder node is determined by the processes of fuzzification, fuzzy inference, and defuzzification. The simulation results showed that compared with the performance of the existing EERDT and M‐TSIMPLE protocols, the proposed EARP has better performance, including extending network lifetime and improving the reliability of data transmission.