On the mobility management performance of NEMO-based nested wireless body area networks

Given the currently fast evolution of wireless access technologies, high-performance mobile devices and wide variety of wearable medical sensors, electronic and mobile healthcare (eHealth and mHealth) services are receiving particular attention nowadays. Several mHealth application scenarios strongly rely on mobile or embedded devices interconnected with medical sensors via Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). The vast majority of these services require strict medical level Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) provision. Emergency use-cases like remote patient monitoring, tele-consultation and guided surgical intervention demand real-time communication and appropriate connection quality during any mobility event. In many cases the mHealth WBANs are nested into other overlay access networks around the patient. To fulfil the quality requirements of such applications, during the various mobility scenarios not only a single mobile entity has to be considered, but also entire nested WBANs (moving between different networks) have to be taken into account. If network layer mobility management is required (like in case of inter-technology handovers under heterogeneous radio coverages), still NEMO Basic Support (RFC 3963) is the most common standardized approach to be implemented. Motivated by this, the paper investigates mobility management performance issues of NEMO-based nested WBANs. The evaluation is based on INET/OMNeT++ simulations and transport layer characteristics.