Robust Medical Data Delivery for Wireless Pervasive Healthcare

The use of wireless sensor networks as a means for providing remote healthcare provides a unique opportunity to reduce the healthcare cost through more efficient use of clinical resources and earlier detection of medical conditions. Despite the initial promising results, there remain significant obstacles to apply this technology to the practical medical care context. In this paper, we investigate one of the critical issues-how to assure the timely and reliable delivery of life-critical medical data in the pervasive patient monitoring networks. In this paper, our study is based on the remote health monitoring system CareNet which is built on top of a two-tier wireless sensor networks. In particular, we present an integrated admission control and routing solution to ensure the quality of admitted sensor delivery services. Using an optimization-based approach, our solution can maximally utilize the scarce wireless resource and satisfy the monitoring service requirements from the most number of patients. The novelty of our approach come from its patient activity awareness, which is used to provide more accurate estimation of the network capacity and worst-case assurance of the service quality under all patient movement scenarios. Extensive experiment and simulation results are presented to validate our proposed solution.