Mobility Management for Healthcare Services in CoAP-based IoT Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) can be used to solve many problems in various fields. Especially, the healthcare service is one of the promising application areas for IoT. For healthcare services, the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard can be used to provide data structures and RESTful APIs to allow easy exchange of medical-related data. We also note that many different types of sensors can be used for healthcare services. However, the works on the framework and protocol to manage the healthcare sensors in an integrated manner have not been done until now. In addition, the protocol used by the FHIR sensors does not support the RESTful architecture. These could lead to poor interoperability and compatibility for healthcare services. To address such problems, in this paper, we propose an integrated mobility management scheme for healthcare services in the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) based IoT networks. By experimentation, we see that the proposed scheme can be used to control the healthcare sensors regardless the underlying data link layer protocols used by sensors and that the proposed scheme gives reasonable handover performance for healthcare services in terms of the response time and the transmission delay of streaming messages.