IReHMo: An efficient IoT-based remote health monitoring system for smart regions

Abstract

Abstract-The ageing population worldwide is constantly rising, both in urban and regional areas. There is a need for IoTbased remote health monitoring systems that take care of the health of elderly people without compromising their convenience and preference of staying at home. However, such systems may generate large amounts of data. The key research challenge addressed in this paper is to efficiently transmit healthcare data within the limit of the existing network infrastructure, especially in remote areas. In this paper, we identified the key network requirements of a typical remote health monitoring system in terms of real-time event update, bandwidth requirements and data generation. Furthermore, we studied the network communication protocols such as CoAP, MQTT and HTTP to understand the needs of such a system, in particular the bandwidth requirements and the volume of generated data. Subsequently, we have proposed IReHMo -an IoT-based remote health monitoring architecture that efficiently delivers healthcare data to the servers. The CoAP-based IReHMo implementation helps to reduce up to 90% volume of generated data for a single sensor event and up to 56% required bandwidth for a healthcare scenario. Finally, we conducted a scalability analysis to determine the feasibility of deploying IReHMo in large numbers in regions of north Sweden.

Choice of effective messaging protocols for IoT systems: MQTT, CoAP, AMQP and HTTP

“…3 exhibits the relative comparison of these messaging protocols based on their normal power consumption and resource requirement. The graph highlights the similar patterns as the first one, where HTTP requires highest power and resource than any other protocols, and then it decreases for the other protocols with CoAP requires lowest power and resource [7], [8], [9], [16], [17], [20], [21], [22]. Both CoAP and MQTT are designed for low bandwidth and resourceconstrained devices and can be used on an 8-bit controller and 100s bytes of memory.…”

“…2: Message Size vs. Message Overhead protocols with CoAP incurring the lowest message size and overhead [7], [8], [9], [16], [17]. MQTT, AMQP and HTTP run on TCP; therefore, they incur all TCP connection overheads for connection establishment and closing.…”

“…However, MQTT is lightweight and has the least header size of 2-byte per message but its requirement of TCP connection increases the overall overhead, and thus the whole message size. CoAP runs on UDP; consequently, it does not incur connection overheads as UDP works in fire and forget basis [7], [9], [17], [18]. This reduces the overall overhead considerably, and thus the whole message size.…”

“…AMQP is also a lightweight binary protocol; however, its support for security, reliability, provisioning and interoperability increases the overhead and message size [14], [19]. Finally, HTTP among all four is the most verbose and heavyweight protocol [17]. It was originally designed for the Web and not for the IoT; therefore, it requires maximum overhead and message size among all.…”

“…Both CoAP and MQTT are designed for low bandwidth and resourceconstrained devices and can be used on an 8-bit controller and 100s bytes of memory. Various experimental studies found that CoAP consumes slightly less power and resources in similar circumstances: unreliable scenario (MQTT QoS 0 vs. CoAP NON), and reliable scenario (MQTT QoS 1 or 2 vs. CoAP CON), while assuming that no packet losses are happened [7], [8], [9], [17], [18]. AMQP requires slightly higher power and resources due to performing other necessary operations for provisioning and reliability [14], [19].…”