Performance of hierarchical agent based Wireless Sensor Mesh Network for patient health monitoring

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) has become a significant technology and Wireless (body) sensors can be deployed on patients to continually monitor their physiological health conditions. These body sensors are very tiny devices and when attached to the human patient body would eliminate the need for continuously monitoring by a nurse/doctor. The wireless body sensors can then be configured to convey the patient's status directly to the assigned doctor/nurse through the personal smart phone, PDA or Palm device. In this situation, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) can be used to transmit vital information arising form the wireless Body sensor Network (WBSN) to the backbone network. It may be mentioned that WMN which is an extension of LAN, has far better range involving very little wiring. The integration of WBSN and WMN technologies, results in Wireless Sensor Mesh Network (WSMN) and this technique has already been proposed by one of the authors of this paper, for usage in the medical field. In this paper we present the results on the performance of such a WSMN used for patient health monitoring application, in terms of parameters like delay, MAC delay and throughput under varying number of patients and varying number of doctors in wards, based on simulation study carried out with Opnet modeller 15.0.