A Home Area Heterogeneous Wireless Management Scheme by Wi-SUN FAN and Wi-Fi Systems

In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous wireless management scheme for a home area network (HAN) system. The HAN system integrates multiple wireless systems (e.g., the Wi-Fi operating in the 2.4 GHz-band and the Wi-SUN field area network (Wi-SUN FAN) operating in the sub-GHz-band) for the in-home health care management system. The system assumes a medical care and proactive health management, and a variety of data such as the vital data, the environment data, and the user activity data are collected to a coordinator by using IoT gateways (IoT-GWs). For the transmission scheme between the loT-GWs, we compare two schemes; the conventional FAN scheme and the proposed fast-path scheme. In the FAN scheme, all of the measured data are collected by using the Wi-SUN FAN multi-hop transmission. On the other hand, the proposed fast-path scheme uses both the Wi-Fi and the Wi-SUN FAN, and a part of the data is offloaded to the Wi-Fi from the Wi-SUN FAN. These two schemes are evaluated by computer simulations. In the case that only the vital and environmental data are collected to the coordinator, these data can be collected with the end-to-end (E2E) transmission success rate of 98 % in the proposed fast-path scheme compared with 92 % in the conventional FAN scheme.