Wireless Sensor Networks for Biomedical Applications

Quality of Service, Admission Control and Lifetime-Extending Challenges

biomedical sensors

Authors: Carlos Abreu,  Paulo Mendes

Biomedical wireless sensor networks empowers the development of new applications and services to improve the quality of medical care provided to the citizens. In such context, these networks need to be integrated on the existing network infrastructure and information systems and, at the same time, guarantee high levels of quality of service. They have to fulfil high levels of reliability and confidence in order to be accepted and used to improve inpatient monitoring in hospital units. These requirements of quality of service must be addressed on the project and development stages and monitored during the network operation. On the project stage, the requirements of quality of service must be identified and accurately characterised; on the development stage, it is necessary to implement the mechanisms that ensure its accomplishment; finally, during the network operation, it is crucial to monitor the network to evaluate its performance and manage the admission of new nodes. Another important issue related with biomedical wireless sensor networks is the network lifetime, designed to be as long as possible. To maximise the network lifetime, the energy efficiency is another important issue in biomedical wireless sensor networks. In this way, this work [1] presents the implementation and evaluation of an energy aware deployment strategy based on an energy aware objective function to the routing protocol for low power and lossy networks and relay nodes. The proposed method improves the network lifetime at the cost of a little degradation on the packets reception ratio. As future contribution, is being developed a system for continuous performance monitoring and admission control for biomedical wireless sensor networks.

[1] Abreu, C.; P., Mendes Wireless Sensor Networks for Biomedical Applications – Quality of Service, Admission Control and Lifetime-Extending Challenges. In 3rd Portuguese Bioengineering Meeting. Braga, Portugal, 20-22 February 2013.