Is multicast useful in health care monitoring systems?

Health care monitoring is a technique for early detection of many symptoms and illness. As a step forward to ubiquitous monitoring, wireless sensor networks could be a solution for health care monitoring. However, wireless sensor networks do not support heavy load because they have limited energy, short transmission range, low throughput and small memory storage. This paper uses multicast protocols to reduce the network load. We tested some multicast and unicast routing protocols under a mixed mobility model for health care using the NS-2 simulator in wireless sensor networks. Our simulation results show that the On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMR) performs better than other routing protocols in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and Normalized routing overhead.