Congestion Free Routing Mechanism for IoT-Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks for Smart Healthcare Applications

Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) topology has used to collect physical, physiological, vital signs of patients in consumer-centric e-health or consumer' wellness care services. In such healthcare systems, varieties of medical sensors are attached to the patients to collect vital signs from those who are under observation. The data gathering process in IoT-enabled Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) suffers from the congestion problem. The effect of this translates on missing packets, a decrease of reliability and throughput degradation in IoT-enabled WSN. This article proposes a distributed congestion control algorithm for IoT-enabled WSNs to effectively resolve the congestion for healthcare applications. The proposed scheme alleviates congestion by a priority-based data routing strategy. Furthermore, this article presents a priority queue based scheduling scheme for better reliability. We analyze the properties of the proposed congestion control mechanism mathematically and validate its performance through extensive simulation and real-life experiments. The application of this work can be used to an early warning system in detecting abnormal heart rate, blood pressure, ECG, EMG in the hospital/home care environment to the state-of-art diagnosis.

I. Introduction

Recent advances in microelectronics fabrication and Very Large-Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuit technologies allowed the development of smart electronics devices with the capability of sensing, processing, and transmission [1]–[5]. These electronic devices are combined to form a network that achieves some shared objectives. They interact with the physical world pervasively with the aid of enhanced communication protocols and distributed intelligence, which constitute a novel paradigm called the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT is possible through the integration of several heterogeneous network infrastructures such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication systems, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and much more. WSNs are used for tracking the status of the real-world object. All these different network infrastructures together compose the backbone network infrastructure for IoT. WSN has a lot of unique challenges and constraints such as self-management, energy limitation, congested packet transmissions, ad hoc deployment, unattended operation, etc. This unique infrastructure nature of WSN demands a protocol designed that should fit for its specialties, especially for the consumer-centric e-health or consumer’ wellness care services.