Design and Analysis of a Reliable, Prioritized and Cognitive Radio-Controlled Telemedicine Network Architecture for Internet of Healthcare Things

This paper proposes and evaluates a reliable and efficient wireless telemedicine network architecture using cognitive radio network technology for e-Health applications. The proposed architectural framework is designed, to tackle congestion and inconsistency in network availability using the cognitive radio (CR) and to provide priority-based health services to distant primary health care centers. The proposed architectural framework utilizes the (1) dynamic prioritization scheme of the data, based on patient condition (2) prioritization based channel allocation using novel MAC protocol and (3) efficient utilization multiple wireless communication technologies using cognitive radio network. This paper utilizes the Data Sensitive Adaptive MAC (DSA-MAC) protocol for medical data prioritization and transmission at a body area network level (consist of multiple wireless medical sensors implanted on the single patient) of communication. Based on DSA-MAC, a novel MAC layer protocol, Node Sensitive Adaptive MAC (NSA-MAC) protocol is developed to prioritize the different patients based on their medical conditions and assist the prioritization based data transfer. Finally, the proposed architectural framework tackles congestion and inconsistency in network availability by shifting the data transfer process to any of the available networks (GSM, 3G-UMTS, WiMAX and 4G-LTE), with the help of cognitive radio technology.