QoS aware routing in body-to-body network for emergency medical care: issues and challenges

Abstract

With the increase in frequencies and unpredictability of disasters worldwide, there is a necessity for novel ubiquitous communication systems enabling Emergency Medical Care (EMC) at the disaster site for e-triaging of the victims. It is necessary to give importance to the transmission of critical victims' data as opposed to non-critical victims' data, over the deployed communication system towards the medical caretaker at the disaster site. This needs the requirement of medical condition aware Quality-of-Service (QoS) support for the transmission of the heterogeneous type of medical data. This paper proposes the deployment of Body-to-Body network (BBN/B2B) to transmit medical data towards the healthcare professionals to perform e-triaging. Further, the paper focuses on the importance of medical condition aware probabilistic and differentiated flow specific and network-specific QoS support at BBN to improve the quality and speediness of the e-triage by analysing design criteria required by the routing protocol for BBN at EMC. The proposed approach is applicable to disaster management, mobile health monitoring, military, and sports training.