Failure Performance Study of Hierarchical Agent Based Patient Health Monitoring in Wireless Body Sensor Mesh Network

Wireless (body) sensors are being deployed on patients to continually monitor their physiological health conditions. These body sensors are very tiny devices and when attached to the human patient body would eliminate the need for continuously monitoring by a nurse/doctor. These can be configured to convey the patient´s status directly to the assigned doctor/nurse through the personal smart phone, PDA or Palm device. In this situation, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) can also be used to transmit vital information arising form the wireless Body sensor Network (WBSN) to the backbone network. The integration of WBSN and WMN technologies, results in Wireless Sensor Mesh Network (WSMN). In this paper we present the results on the performance of such a WSMN used for patient health monitoring application, in terms of parameters like delay, MAC delay and throughput under varying number of patients and varying number of doctors in wards and also the failure performance when the mesh nodes fail, based on simulation study carried out with Opnet modeller 15.0.