A Novel Patient Monitoring Framework and Routing Protocols for Energy & QoS Aware Communication in Body Area Networks

Abstract

Significant challenges to patient monitoring systems in a hospital environment include the reliable and energy-efficient transmission of data and their real-time display. This thesis proposes innovative and novel mechanisms for the reliable transmission of patient data in Body Area Network (BAN) communication, which simultaneously ensure high throughput, low data latency, and low energy consumption by implementing energy and QoS aware routing protocols. Five main contributions are made in this regard. Firstly, a novel patient monitoring system (ZK-BAN peering framework) is proposed for real-time hospital BAN communication that displays patient data on the display units by considering data privacy, low energy consumption, better control on the devices, and patient mobility. Secondly, a novel energy-aware peering routing protocol (EPR) is introduced in which the choice of next hop is based on the residual energy and geographic information of the neighbor nodes. EPR contains three main components: a Hello protocol, a neighbor table constructor algorithm, and a routing table constructor algorithm. Thirdly, a new modular QoS-aware routing protocol (QPRD) is designed to handle the ordinary and delay-sensitive data for BAN communication in hospitals. QPRD provides an end-to-end path delay mechanism to calculate the path delays of all possible paths from a source to destination and then chooses the best path with the lowest path delay for delay-sensitive packets. Fourthly, a novel modular QoS-aware routing protocol (QPRR) is developed to handle ordinary and reliability-sensitive data for BAN communication in hospitals. The modular architecture of QPRR includes five modules: a reliability module, a packet classifier, a Hello protocol module, a routing services module, and a QoS-aware queuing module. The proposed mechanisms for end-to-end path reliability calculation and data transmission using redundant paths ensure more reliable BAN communication. Finally, a new integrated energy and QoS aware routing protocol (ZEQoS) is designed to deal with ordinary, delay-sensitive, and reliability-sensitive data packets. Extensive simulations in the OMNeT++ based Castalia 3.2 simulator show that EPR, QPRD, QPRR, and ZEQoS perform better than other similar energy and QoS aware routing protocols.