Congestion control for differentiated healthcare service delivery in emerging heterogeneous wireless body area networks

Rapid advances in Information and Communications Technologies are enabling the wide diffusion of healthcare systems which allow a continuous remote patient monitoring and diagnostics by doctors. The need for pervasive and ubiquitous healthcare services has accelerated the development of heterogeneous communication architectures that integrate one or more different types of wired and wireless network technologies such as those used in the Internet, and in cellular, wireless body networks, and ad hoc networks. However, these modern healthcare systems have established some additional critical requirements and challenges, compared to traditional wireless networks, such as reliability and the timely access to diagnostic information without failure. The main aim of this article is to propose a healthcare traffic control over the modern heterogeneous wireless network to avoid congestion phenomena and guarantee QoS (Quality of Service) in terms of service reliability and responsiveness. First, a proportional fair allocation control strategy at each healthcare terminal device/router is implemented to regulate the rate of data flow proportionally to the information priority. The priority can be related to both the bandwidth requirement for the reliable communication of a vital signal and to the level of emergency in specific acute care, clinical disease and outbreak/disaster situations. Secondly, we present a congestion control based on the adaptive fairness criterion that can deal with differentiated and dynamic healthcare scenarios. A simulator environment has been built to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.