PACKET TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT IN UBIQUITOUS HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
Wan‐Young Chung, Su-Lin Koay, Sang‐Joong Jung, Tae-Ha Kwon · Biomedical Engineering Applications Basis and Communications · 2012
Recent advances in wireless sensor network (WSN) envisaging ubiquitous healthcare system that simplifies the monitoring and treatment of patients. WSN also pose several challenges to ubiquitous healthcare applications. As healthcare application commonly handle two different types of data such as wave-like data of ECG and linear waveform-independent data of body temperature, blood pressure and oxygen content. As wave-like data requires a higher sampling rate than waveform-independent data, the transmission of wave-like data in WSN causes traffic congestion and, consequently, loss of vital signal in transmission. With the increasing number of sensor nodes involved in the WSN field, network congestion issue is rapidly coming known as a tangible issue in healthcare system that must be addressed in order to maintain data reliability. Sensor nodes have very limited computational resources due to its energy consumption. To reduce traffics in WSN communication, the biomedical data are sent when they had very serious problems. The collaboration among sensors through task mapping based in-network processing is adapted to achieve higher processing power and reduce traffics in WSN. System analysis shows that the data packet loss in the ubiquitous healthcare system is dramatically reduced after the implementation of this process. By adapting fall detection, not only the numbers of packets received by the base station are greatly reduced but also the traffic overload problems in WSN are also resolved.