Addressing Un-cooperation of Routers in Wireless Patient Monitoring

Patient monitoring using ad hoc networks has been proposed to overcome the coverage problems of infrastructure-oriented wireless networks, such as wireless LANs and cellular-oriented wireless networks. Although highly innovative and interesting solution to provide patient monitoring, such ad hoc networks rely on the co-operation of other patient monitoring devices as routers. The end-to-end delivery of messages carrying vital signs of patients will be negatively affected by un-cooperation and/or failure of routers. In this paper, we address how to overcome the uncooperation and failure of routers in patient monitoring. More specifically, network routing schemes are presented for delivery of messages from the source device to one of healthcare professionals using ad hoc wireless networks. The performance results show that the impact of un-cooperative nodes in wireless patient monitoring can be minimized by using broadcast and reliable routing schemes. We also present several incentives that can be used in obtaining co-operation from other devices