Performance Analysis of Patient Monitoring Wireless Body Area Networks using Queueing Models

The objective of this paper is to analyse the server utilization and delay tolerance of a patient monitoring wireless body area network (WBAN) in hospital premises. The WBAN considered in this paper uses three tier heterogeneous networking method for communication and the vital data packets are prioritized as normal and emergency packets. In network, first tier consists of ZigBee nodes, second tier has Wi-Fi router acting as server for the packets queues generated by ZigBee radio module. In tier three hospital information system is connected using Ethernet. M/G/1 and M/G/N priority queueing models are implemented at tier two. The performance parameters considered for analysis are priority queueing, delay and server utilization time. By implementing the M/G/1 and M/G/N priority queueing models, it is found that when the number of emergency patients is more, using more number of Wi-Fi routers improves the delay parameters but reduces the server utilization. This factor is further optimized to improve the server utilization.. A delay tolerant WBAN is proposed which uses priority queueing with bulk data arrival conditions.