Vertical Handover Algorithm for WBANs in Ubiquitous Healthcare with Quality of Service Guarantees

Abstract

Recently, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have become an emerging technology in healthcare, where patients are equipped withwearable and implantable body sensor nodes to gather sensory information for remote monitoring. The increasing development of coordinator devices on patients enables the internetworking of WBANs in heterogeneous wireless networks to deliver physiological information that is collected at remote terminals in a timely fashion. However, in this type of network, providing a seamless handover with a guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS), especially emergency services, is a challenging task. In this paper, we proposed an effective Multi-Attribute Decision-Making (MADM) handover algorithm that guarantees seamless connectivity. A patient’s mobile devices automatically connect to the best network that fulfills the QoS requirements of different types of applications. Additionally, we integrated a Content-Centric Networking (CCN) processing module into different wireless networks to reduce packet loss, enhance QoS and avoid unnecessary handovers by leveraging in-network caching to achieve efficient content dissemination for ubiquitous healthcare. Simulation results proved that our proposed approach forthe model with CCN outperforms the model without CCN and Received Signal Strength Vertical Handoff (RSS-VHD) in terms of the number of handovers, enhancing QoS, packet loss, and energy efficiency.

Keywords

• wireless body area network
• multi-attribute decision-making
• content-centric networking