Throughput Improvement of Health Care Networks in Retirement Communities

Retirement Communities are the housing societies for the well-off elderly people, who are staying away from their siblings. The homes in retirement communities are built to cater to physiological needs of the elderly people. They are equipped with health care networks to monitor the health parameters of the residents continuously. The conventional health care networks in such retirement homes suffering a severe throughput degradation problem. Throughput degradation happens due to packet loss. The packets are lost mainly because of three factors-: 1. interference due to co-existing WiFi networks, 2. collisions due to deployment of many sensor nodes in the small geographical area, and 3. congestion due to large number of nodes transmitting data to the coordinator simultaneously. Interference, collision and congestion are parameters belong to three different layers of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) reference model. Most previous works to improve the throughput of health care networks have focused on controlling packet loss only in one of the layers. However, throughput degradation can be controlled effectively by controlling all the three parameters simultaneously. Reducing the packet loss in all the three layers simultaneously is very complex task and requires cross-layer approach. The Authors have developed an interlayer algorithm to reduce the packet loss simultaneously in all three layers. The proposed algorithm is implemented on IEEE 802.1S.4-based wireless sensor nodes. Experiments were conducted to analyze the performance of the algorithm. A 40% improvement in throughput was achieved with the proposed algorithm.