End-to-End 5G Priority Scheduling Strategy for a WBAN Health Monitoring System

A Healthcare Monitoring System (HMS) based on Wireless Body Networks (WBAN) might implement Quality of service (QoS) tools to guarantee some physiological data requirements such as preventing data loss and delay as healthcare applications are time and loss sensitive. Moreover, one of the promising technologies which is being regarded in 5G standard Long Term Evolution (LTE) is Machine-to-Machine communications (M2M) which is a key component of Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, two complementary issues have been addressed at the WBAN coordinator radio interface and at the radio 4G/5G interface, respectively, for a complete end-to-end Quality of Service support. At the WBAN part, we focus on mitigation of delay at the coordinator for emergency and medical traffic flows by proposing a new scheduling strategy named PWRR (Priority-Weighted Round Robin). At the cellular 5G interface, service differentiation strategies for a reliable transmission of priority packets for the traffic have been considered. To this end, an adaptive Multiple ACB factors (MACB) algorithm is proposed to improve the regular ACB (Access Class Baring) method, according to M2M traffic category with respect to their access delay budget and drop rate. Analytical and simulation results show that the overall system offers much improvements in terms of delay of emergency and medical data flows compared to the other strategies in literature.