A Practical Traffic Scheduling Scheme for Differentiated Services of Healthcare Systems on Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have recently been extensively researched due to the flexibility and cost savings they provide. One of the most promising applications of sensor networks is human health monitoring: wireless sensors are placed on the human body to form a wireless body network where the sensor node can continuously monitor real-time physiological parameters or human activities (motion detection). However, along with the flexibility, many problems arise due to a number of factors, including the bad quality of transmission media and the scarcity of resources. Moreover, sensor networks have different characteristics such as a variety of devices, different generated data, etc. From a quality of service (QoS) point of view, the healthcare domain can be seen as a real-time application demand to consider application requirements. Healthcare domains principally have stringent delay and loss requirements. Thus, considering different capabilities and ensuring time data delivery become necessary. Because wireless body area networks (WBAN) deal with human life, any delayed or lost data can endanger the user’s life. This paper proposes a differentiated traffic and scheduling scheme for WBAN. It is based on patients’ data classification and prioritization according to their current status and diseases. Through queue scheduling and path choice issues, the urgent data are delivered on time to provide a QoS guarantee for WBAN. Finally, it is shown that the proposed scheme is efficient for timely data transfer in WBAN.