A Priority Based Energy-Efficient Metaheuristic Routing Approach for Smart Healthcare System (SHS)

The advancement in IoT expedites the traditional healthcare system from one-to-one interaction to telemedicine. Smart Healthcare System (SHS) offers enormous physician and patient-centric solutions. Alongside, delay and energy degradation-related challenges in healthcare services put the patient’s lives at risk. This is because the healthcare data have not been prioritised and all the IP-based data packets are treated the same during the routing process. Inspired by this, a hybrid and robust priority-based Duty-Cycled with Ant Colony Optimisation Routing (DC-ACOP) mechanism has been proposed in this study. The body sensor nodes use their radios to get activated and deactivated. So, dynamic duty cycling has been introduced to activate the communication unit of sensor nodes on demand. The data packets are defined with precedence to serve the highest priority packets first in the Type of Service (ToS) field of IP packets. The precedence-based data packets facilitate the healthcare services on time based on the criticality of the patient. The priorities on the wireless relay node are defined by comparing the encrypted disease levels and thresholds. For efficient route determination, a metaheuristic-based improved ACO approach has been employed in SHS. The proposed DC-ACOP approach has been evaluated and compared with other state-of-the-art approaches to accomplish tangible results in terms of quality metrics such as residual energy, throughput, network lifetime, delay with prioritisation and without prioritisation, packet delivery rate, and the number of non-alive nodes.