An e-Healthcare Sensor Network Load-balancing Scheme using SDN-SFC

The constant rapid growth and development of modern medical technology has resulted in an ever-growing demand for higher quality health monitoring systems. This is especially true for the development of the Internet of Things: as the Internet of Things becomes more ubiquitous in daily life, so does the possibility of, and demand for, the ability to remotely monitor the health of patients at anytime, anywhere, using a wide variety of biometric information. Thus e-Healthcare has become a significant trend in the medical field. In addition to monitoring a patient's health remotely, data can also be relayed to doctors or hospitals in real-time, in order to assist in correct medical decision-making. Hospitals have begun to implement this technology, and patients therefore have immediate access to required diagnoses and care. However, the use of a large number of remote medical sensors requires significant bandwidth, especially when relaying real-time information. Hospital networks thus become susceptible to problems arising from network congestion. This study proposes a load-balancing mechanism based on SDN-SFC for the optimization of hospital remote-monitoring network planning, which simultaneously eliminates the need for large amounts of hardware.