HOCA: Healthcare Aware Optimized Congestion Avoidance and control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of a large number of small, low-power sensors that communicate through wireless links. Wireless sensor networks for healthcare have emerged in recent years as a result of the need to collect data about patients’ physical, physiological, and vital signs in the spaces ranging from personal to hospital and availability of the low cost sensors that enables this data collection. One of the major challenges in these networks is to mitigate congestion. In healthcare applications, such as medical emergencies or monitoring vital signs of patients, because of the importance and criticality of transmitted data, it is essential to avoid congestion as much as possible (and in cases when congestion avoidance is not possible, to control the congestion). In this paper, a data centric congestion management protocol using AQM (Active Queue Managements) is proposed for healthcare applications with respect to the inherent characteristics of these applications. This study deals with end to end delay, energy consumption, lifetime and fairness. The proposed protocol which is called HOCA avoids congestion in the first step (routing phase) using multipath and QoS (Quality of Service) aware routing. And in cases where congestion cannot be avoided, it will be mitigated via an optimized congestion control algorithm. The efficiency of HOCA was evaluated using the OPNET simulator. Simulation results indicated that HOCA was able to achieve its goals.