IP mobility adoption in e-health services: a solution to modern healthcare monitoring system

Modern healthcare systems use wearable sensor devices that facilitate the data aggregation which is used for real time patient monitoring. The scenario may be static or a mobile healthcare system where the mobility of a patient can be tracked inside the hospital premises. For this reason, the hospital wireless network needs to be equipped with an efficient mobility management scheme that enables the transmission of aggregated data without loss and delay to the monitoring station. In this context, this paper proposes a mobility scheme based on the PMIPv6 protocol that utilises pre-registration feature of FMIPv6 to trigger the handover process, which helps in reducing the hand-off (HO) delay and eventually leads to the reduced packet loss. The proposed scheme is analysed theoretically first, followed by its evaluation using NS2 simulator. Data results depict that the proposed scheme outperforms the traditional PMIPv6 in terms of HO-delay, packet loss and signalling cost.