Deployment analysis for wireless multi-hop home healthcare networks

In this paper, the deployment analysis considering the latency in data forwarding stage for an in-home healthcare network with wireless multi-hop relaying for long-term electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring is presented and performed. By means of multi-hop transmission, the ECG data of elders or chronic patients with heart diseases can be automatically acquired by the mobile-care device and wirelessly relayed to the residential gateway via the proposed network at any time or any place at home. Then the residential gateway uploads data to the back-end care server through Internet to carry out the patient´s health condition monitoring and the management of pathological data. In order to effectively and timely forward the ECG data to the residential gateway in the house, the aim of this paper is to estimate and determine the maximum hop count of relay nodes needed to be deployed to achieve the ECG data relaying in time and the optimal communication coverage in the house. Finally, the simulation and performance evaluation results are given to verify the analysis.