ECG rate control scheme in pervasive health care monitoring system

One of the major challenges in healthcare wireless body area network (WBAN) applications is to control congestion. Unpredictable traffic load, many-To-one communication nature and limited bandwidth occupancy are among major reasons that can cause congestion in such applications. Congestion has negative impacts on the overall network performance such as increasing end-To-end delay and wasting energy consumption due to a large number of retransmissions. In life-critical applications, any delay in transmitting vital signals may lead to a serious consequences including patient death. Therefore, an approach for congestion estimation and control is imperative to enhance the network quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we propose a new fuzzy based congestion detection and control protocol for a WBAN application that monitors patient ECG signals remotely. The proposed system is able to detect link congestion by considering local information such as available bandwidth (BW) and end to end delay. The proposed protocol changes the rate of transferred ECG information and assigns priorities to patients based on their level of urgency. As a result, the proposed approach provides a better QoS for transmitting highly important ECG signs.