IEET: Improving Emergent Events Transmission for Home Elderly Care With Multi-Layer BLE Topology Control

As the elderly population continues to grow, timely health monitoring and emergency response for the elderly become particularly crucial. However, traditional wireless sensor networks face challenges such as transmission delays, high energy consumption, network congestion, and packet collisions during emergencies, which impact the health and safety of the elderly. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel multi-layer topology control mechanism, called Improving Emergent Events Transmission (IEET), which integrates tree and mesh topologies while applying channel selection and subrated connection strategies. The tree topology effectively constructs a distinct path for emergent transmission, filtering out channels susceptible to contentions and collisions. It employs a subrated connection scheme to adjust the connection interval for transmitting emergency messages, thus reducing transmission delay and energy consumption. Additionally, the mesh topology addresses traffic congestion near the gateway, reducing packet collisions and improving the reliability of packet transmission. As a result, emergent information can be swiftly transmitted to the gateway, mitigating the impact of emergencies on the elderly. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed IEET outperforms existing mechanisms in terms of average packet latency, network lifetime, and energy consumption for sensors in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) networks.