A Reliable System-of-Systems Healthcare Monitoring Framework

Abstract

System-of-systems (SoS) have recently been used in several applications and scenarios in the field of safety, defense, and healthcare. In an SoS environment, the entire system is divided into sub-systems, which provides more flexibility and reduces the management cost of the entire system. SoS have been widely used in healthcare monitoring services, where patients are provided with medical sensors that send their medical measurements to a remote unit for further processing and decision-making. These sensors communicate with an access point using the wireless channel, which gives patients flexibility in mobility and makes the monitoring system more convenient and comfortable. However, sending data over the wireless channel presents several challenges, such as contention between the different sensors in accessing the channel and the bit errors associated with the noisy wireless channel. In this paper, an SoS healthcare monitoring framework is proposed, where a wireless communication protocol is proposed that addresses the sensors’ node network access contention and mitigates the bit errors of the communication channel by providing forward error correction bits to the transmitted packets. In addition, the protocol takes into consideration the sensors’ importance and criticality, such that more important sensors are given more network access time and more error correction bits, which in turn results in a robust transmission process with low transmission delay. The simulation results show the proposed wireless communication protocol’s effectiveness in lowering the packet loss, giving higher priority and having higher throughput for the more critical sensors.

Keywords

• System-of-systems
• e-health
• healthcare monitoring
• real-time communication
• scheduling
• reliability