Applied Sciences (Aug 2017)
An Efficient Network Coding-Based Fault-Tolerant Mechanism in WBAN for Smart Healthcare Monitoring Systems
Abstract
As a key technology in smart healthcare monitoring systems, wireless body area networks (WBANs) can pre-embed sensors and sinks on body surface or inside bodies for collecting different vital signs parameters, such as human Electrocardiograph (ECG), Electroencephalograph (EEG), Electromyogram (EMG), body temperature, blood pressure, blood sugar, blood oxygen, etc. Using real-time online healthcare, patients can be tracked and monitored in normal or emergency conditions at their homes, hospital rooms, and in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). In particular, the reliability and effectiveness of the packets transmission will be directly related to the timely rescue of critically ill patients with life-threatening injuries. However, traditional fault-tolerant schemes either have the deficiency of underutilised resources or react too slowly to failures. In future healthcare systems, the medical Internet of Things (IoT) for real-time monitoring can integrate sensor networks, cloud computing, and big data techniques to address these problems. It can collect and send patient’s vital parameter signal and safety monitoring information to intelligent terminals and enhance transmission reliability and efficiency. Therefore, this paper presents a design in healthcare monitoring systems for a proactive reliable data transmission mechanism with resilience requirements in a many-to-one stream model. This Network Coding-based Fault-tolerant Mechanism (NCFM) first proposes a greedy grouping algorithm to divide the topology into small logical units; it then constructs a spanning tree based on random linear network coding to generate linearly independent coding combinations. Numerical results indicate that this transmission scheme works better than traditional methods in reducing the probability of packet loss, the resource redundant rate, and average delay, and can increase the effective throughput rate.
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