A Priority-Aware Truthful Mechanism for Supporting Multi-Class Delay-Sensitive Medical Packet Transmissions in E-Health Networks

In this paper, the design of priority-aware truthful mechanisms for multi-class delay-sensitive medical packet transmissions in electronic health (e-health) networks is studied. Unlike most of existing works, we focus on beyond wireless body area network (beyond-WBAN) communications, and consider the absolutely prioritized transmission scheduling as the realization of medical-grade quality of service, i.e., more critical medical packets have to always be transmitted prior to the ones with less emergency. In our model, medical packets arrive randomly at each WBAN-gateway (which ordinarily stands for one patient), and their beyond-WBAN transmission requests are reported to the network regulator (i.e., the base station) with different packet priorities which reflect their medical importance. The base station then dynamically manages the beyond-WBAN transmission service by formulating a multi-class multi-server priority queueing system. Taking into account the potential strategic behaviors from smart gateways, we design a truthful mechanism which can guarantee that all gateways will honestly report the actual priorities of their medical packets, while at the same time incentivize the base station to provide channel usages for e-health services. Theoretical analyses and simulation results examine the desired properties of our proposed mechanism, and demonstrate its feasibility and superiority compared to counterparts.