A QoS-aware routing service framework for biomedical sensor networks

Biomedical sensor networks have been widely used in medical scenarios. Examples include patient monitoring, elderly assistance and disaster response. In medical applications, where data packets usually contain vital sign information and the network used for communications should guarantee that these packets can be delivered to the medical center within a given time and a certain packet delivery ratio. In other words, a set of Quality of Services (QoS) must be satisfied. In this paper, a cross-layer designed QoS-aware routing service framework is proposed. The main goal of the framework is to provide prioritized routing service and user specific QoS support. Routes are determined by user specific QoS metrics, wireless channel status, packet priority level, and sensor node's willingness to be a router. Furthermore, the routing service can send feedback on network conditions to the user application, so the medical application service level can be adjusted to obtain the highest adaptability and robustness. Simulation results have shown that the routing service framework performs well in respects of QoS metrics and energy efficiency in various medical scenarios. The routing service can provide guaranteed QoS for users of high priority level and acceptable network performances for 'best effort' required users.