## 6 Performance Analysis
In case of a route failure, a packet forwarder considered an alternative node as a potential forwarder towards the sink without conflicting situations. Thus, a significant amount of time spent in negotiation with the neighboring nodes is saved in the packet forwarding process. Because of these reasons, the developed protocol performed better in terms of minimizing overall network latency. The main issue of high latency in the ELR-W scheme is that more initial calculations are required to check various packet forwarding conditions before data transmission, which consumes more  
Figure 3: Latency vs node density. processing time at each relay node along a routing path and, thus, leads to more delay. However, the latency of packet forwarding gradually decreased with time once the initial calculations were done; therefore, it performed better than CRPBA protocol. In addition, direct communication over a longer distance also helps ELR-\(W\) to convey packets in a robust manner towards the sink. However, this long-distance communication with lower link quality creates a number of corrupted data packets in ELR-W protocol. On the other hand, one of the main reasons for the high latency in CRPBA is its unstable cluster architecture, which contains small-sized and large-sized clusters. Therefore, the average number of hops visited by the data packets increases between the source and the sink, which contributes to latency. This also increases the probability of data path loops; thus, the data packets do not reach the destination at a specific time. In addition, the data path loop also causes congestion for the relay nodes along a routing path since nodes keep transmitting the packets, which impact the communication delay. In addition, the CRPBA protocol has no specific policy to forward the packets on alternate paths in case of a route node failure. In the route recovery process, it spends a significant amount of time in negotiation with the neighboring nodes in order to find a new forwarder node. Therefore, in most cases, the sensitive data become invalid due to lack of an available path towards the sink. These invalid data packets reduced the overall packet delivery ratio in the CRPBA scheme. However, the small size clustering architecture reduces the burden on relay nodes even when a huge amount of patient data is routed in the network. Therefore, the low packet error rate performance of CRPBA is fairly conclusive compared to ELR-W, as shown in Figure 4. The main disadvantage of the ELR-W routing protocol, which results in a high packet error rate, is its lack of considering the interference issues during link stability measurements between the forwarder nodes. In addition, it does not always select the shortest path during packets forwarding, which not only increases the chance of packet loss due to path loops but also creates excessive interference for neighboring nodes in the network. The SARP protocol compared to CRPBA and ELR-W protocols achieved the lowest packets error rate, around 2.25% of the originated data packets, as shown in Figure 4. This best performance of a low packet error rate in SARP is due to its high link quality between sensors and cluster leaders and forwarder cluster heads. In addition, the designed scheme during the packet forwarding process appropriately considers the hop counts, which further reduces the probability of corrupted packets occurring in BASNs. All aforesaid factors result in a high network throughput in SARP compared to CRPBA and ELR-W protocols, as shown in Figure 5. In fact, throughput is the measurement of the number of packet transfers over a link in a given amount of time. It is usually computed in bits per second (bps). Simulation facts, shown in Figure 5, make it clear that SARP achieved more than 96% throughput and outperformed the ELR-W than CRPBA protocols in BASNs.