Context-aware IPv6 Flow Mobility for Multi-sensor Based Mobile Patient Monitoring and Tele-consultation

Recently, the rapid growth of multi-access mobile devices interconnected with different wearable biosignal sensors via Body Area Network (BAN) play an increasingly important role in healthcare systems and provide significant solutions for scenarios of home healthcare, real-time remote/mobile patient monitoring and ubiquitous tele-consultation. The proliferation of different radio access technologies make possible mobile healthcare (mHealth) services to actively benefit from the advances of heterogeneous and overlapping wireless networks. The varying characteristics of mHealth applications (particularly different real-time monitoring solutions) in means of the required network resources and Quality of Services parameters invoke elaboration of effective flow-based mobility management algorithms. Aiming to provide a transparent and efficient mobility infrastructure for the mHealth field we designed and developed a context-aware IPv6 flow mobility management scheme for Android focusing on mobile patient monitoring and tele-consultation use-cases in a multi-sensor environment. The proposed solution incorporates a cross-layer optimization platform and relies on MIP6D-NG, which is a client-based, multi-access, flow-aware Mobile IPv6 implementation. We have implemented a real-life multi-sensor testbed architecture where the proposed system with its adaptive flow handover scheme was evaluated.