Feasibility and performance evaluation of a 6LoWPAN-enabled platform for ubiquitous healthcare monitoring

Technology has revolutionized medical practices by enabling more convenient and non-intrusive monitoring of patient's health, leading to next generation ubiquitous healthcare (u-healthcare). The exploitation of the Internet protocol version 6 addressing space along with the miniaturization of electronic devices has fostered providing interoperability and connectivity of wearable sensor devices in wireless body area networks to the Internet of Things. In this paper, we propose to integrate the IPv6 over low power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN) to the u-healthcare monitoring system architecture. The main objective is to study the feasibility of the 6LoWPAN-enabled platform in real-world scenarios dealing with medical data. The performance evaluation of this platform is carried out initially through simulations using OMNet++ and then supported by an experimental study using sensor motes and a customized micro-computing unit. Performance metrics such as throughput, end-to-end delay, packet error rate, and energy consumption are investigated under acute health conditions, where patient's health information has to be sent continuously and at maximum rate to the care provider. The obtained results show that the proposed 6LoWPAN solution fulfills the main quality of service requirements of u-healthcare applications. Copyright (c) 2015John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.