DROPS: Dynamic Radio Protocol Selection for Energy-Constrained Wearable IoT Healthcare

We propose “DROPS”, a scheme which dynamically selects radio protocols in an energy-constrained wearable IoT healthcare system. We consider the use of multiple radio protocols, which are capable of transmitting a patient's sensed physiological parameters to the server through Local Processing Units (LPUs). As the health parameters are non-stationary and temporally fluctuating, especially for critical patients, the selection of an appropriate radio protocol is essential to maintain the accuracy and timely delivery of data from the patient to the server. Additionally, the mobility of patients through various locations within the hospital mandates the selection of the best radio protocol among the multiple available ones for each location, to enable data to offload to the remote server. We use single-leader-multiple-follower Stackelberg non-cooperative game to map the strategic interactions between a patient's LPU and the hospital's server. “DROPS” dynamically selects the appropriate radio protocol, based on the criticality index of a patient, the reputation of the radio, the Euclidean distance between the radios and the LPU, and the load on the protocol. Results on real-life data and their large-scale emulation show that the data rate increases by almost 78% and throughput by approximately 7%, as compared to existing schemes.