Congestion Free Routing Mechanism for IoT-Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks for Smart Healthcare Applications

Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) topology has used to collect physical, physiological, vital signs of patients in consumer-centric e-health or consumer' wellness care services. In such healthcare systems, varieties of medical sensors are attached to the patients to collect vital signs from those who are under observation. The data gathering process in IoT-enabled Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) suffers from the congestion problem. The effect of this translates on missing packets, a decrease of reliability and throughput degradation in IoT-enabled WSN. This article proposes a distributed congestion control algorithm for IoT-enabled WSNs to effectively resolve the congestion for healthcare applications. The proposed scheme alleviates congestion by a priority-based data routing strategy. Furthermore, this article presents a priority queue based scheduling scheme for better reliability. We analyze the properties of the proposed congestion control mechanism mathematically and validate its performance through extensive simulation and real-life experiments. The application of this work can be used to an early warning system in detecting abnormal heart rate, blood pressure, ECG, EMG in the hospital/home care environment to the state-of-art diagnosis.