Delay-Dependent Priority-Aware Transmission Scheduling for E-Health Networks: A Mechanism Design Approach

Abstract

In this paper, the management of medical packet transmissions in electronic health (e-health) networks is studied. Unlike most existing works in the literature, we focus on beyond wireless body area network (beyond-WBAN) communications, i.e., data transmissions from WBAN-gateways (e.g., smart phones) to the base station of medical centers, and consider a delay-dependent priority-aware transmission scheduling, which jointly takes into account both the criticality of medical packets and their starving time (i.e., experienced delays). In our model, medical packets are randomly aggregated at WBAN-gateways (each of which stands for one patient), and their beyond-WBAN transmission requests are reported to the base station with different priority information, which reflects their heterogeneities in medical importance. The base station then manages the beyond-WBAN transmissions following a constructed queueing system with a delay-dependent dynamic priority discipline. With the aim of maximizing the network welfare while preventing unexpected strategic behaviors from smart gateways, we design a truthful and efficient mechanism based on a virtual delay-dependent prioritized queueing game. Analytical and simulation results examine the feasibility of the proposed mechanism and demonstrate its superiority over the counterparts.