A Secure Optimal Cluster–Based Routing Protocol for Medical Data Transmission in Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) Network Integrated Wireless Sensor Network

ABSTRACT A growing number of healthcare sensors are attracting researchers' attention because of their irreplaceable role in numerous applications and new challenges. Flexible sensors transmit health information from the field to healthcare centers via the IoMT network, helping to supply timely assistance to patients. Ensuring secure data collection and transmission to centralized servers is quite difficult. To ensure the secure transmission and collection of medical data, various routing protocols have been proposed. However, these still have high overheads in storage, communication, and energy, which lead to security breaches. In order to deal with multiple attacks in the context of healthcare, security routing protocols must be developed that are efficient. This research proposes SOptC, a secure optimal cluster–based routing protocol designed for secure medical data transmission within IoMT‐WSN environments. In SOptC routing protocol, an efficient clustering is done by using chaotic mine blast optimization (CMBO) algorithm with the environmental information of sensor nodes. Then, we formalize the set of novel design constraints for cluster head (CH) computation, which can be optimized through planet optimization (CH‐PO) algorithm. In addition, we design an improved lightweight crypto algorithm, which combines two block ciphers (RING‐Simon tiered optimizations) for medical data encryption and decryption. The RING‐Simon framework aims to provide better security and reliability to data handled in this wireless sensor network (WSN). Furthermore, a modified group searching (MGS) algorithm is employed for selecting the optimal path between CHs and the sink, providing efficient multipath routing. With this effective approach, energy consumption is reduced by 68.9% and extends network life by 13.4%. It also boosts data throughput by over 27% compared with existing methods. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our SOptC protocol in excess of the state‐of‐the‐art existing methodologies.