A Network Architecture and Routing Protocol for the MEDIcal WARNing System

Abstract

The MEDIcal WARNing (MEDIWARN) system continuously and automatically monitors the vital parameters of pre-intensive care hospitalized patients and, thanks to an intelligent processing system, provides the medical teams with a better understanding of their patients’ clinical condition, thus enabling a prompt reaction to any change. Since the hospital units generally lack a wired infrastructure, a wireless network is required to collect sensor data in a server for processing purposes. This work presents the MEDIWARN communication system, addressing both the network architecture and a simple, lightweight and configurable routing protocol that fits the system requirements, such as the ability to offer path redundancy and mobility support without significantly increasing the network workload and latency. The novel protocol, called the MultiPath Routing Protocol for MEDIWARN (MP-RPM), was therefore designed as a solution to support low-latency reliable transmissions on a dynamic network while limiting the network overhead due to the control messages. The paper describes the MEDIWARN communication system and addresses the experimental performance evaluation of an implementation in a real use-case scenario. Moreover, the work discusses a simulative assessment of the MEDIWARN communication system performance obtained using different routing protocols. In particular, the timeliness and reliability results obtained by the MP-RPM routing protocol are compared with those obtained by two widely adopted routing protocols, i.e., the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) and the Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector Routing (DSDV).

A Perspective on Passive Human Sensing with Bluetooth

“…In the literature, passive (also called deviceless) remote sensing of human beings was first developed using ad hoc RF transmitters and receivers. Next, WiFi off-the-shelf technology, already successfully applied to a variety of other applications, such as patient monitoring [8][9][10] and factory automation [11], was adopted for this goal. The reason for relying on WiFi mainly resides in the high transmission rate, which allows high-frequency sampling, and in the availability of very detailed Channel State Information (CSI), which allows a stable and reliable extraction of the presence, position and activity information of the human subject.…”

Smart Hospitals and IoT Sensors: Why Is QoS Essential Here?

“…Therefore, a sensor data middleware for medical settings must provide QoS to the applications. Currently, some studies are focusing on improving network performance using routing protocols [13,14]. However, they still suffer from problems such as network node overload [13] or lack of focus on acute care environments such as the operating room [14].…”