Cross-layer fault tolerant data aggregation for improved network delay in healthcare management applications

The escalation of American health care costs compels a new approach to manage chronic diseases. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been applied successfully in remote monitoring in military, aerospace, civil structure, and healthcare. However, existing wireless network framework cannot provide required quality of service (QoS) due to communication device failure, message loss caused by link error, collision, and hidden terminal for personalized disease management applications. In this paper, we present scalable network architecture and an operating mechanism that tolerates network structure changes caused by failure, with the application level data aggregation algorithm able to heal from the failure. We provide close form solutions that can achieve optimized network delay. Performance analysis was done to evaluate the significance of different nodes' failure in both homogeneous and heterogeneous sensor network and the effects of sensing and communication speed on failure impact in heterogeneous sensor networks.