IEEE 802.14.5/ZigBee Based WSNs - WPANs and Innovative Application in Medical Health Care Systems

With recent developments in wireless networks field and in sensing technology, new and innovative medical applications based on the wireless sensor networks (WSN) technology are being developed in the research lab or commercial sectors. The key problem of WSN based application in the medical and health care domain is to get the message with the bounded delays and/or real-time data such as the signal of falls, the alarm of heart attacks traversed to the cluster at where the emergence unit located while delivering the steady flows of data with a certain level of Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, we address this problem by proposing to use a periodic scheduling-Time Division Cluster Schedule (TDCS), to avoid the flow collision while meeting the end-to-end delay deadlines. The proposed scheduling mechanism has been studied on simulated Wireless sensor networks with a cluster tree topology on which the OPEN-ZB simulation model is adopted. The preliminary results shown that it is feasible to guarantee the real time medical data delivered on time over the low data rate wireless sensor networks when deployed at medical and/or health care domain, under the governance of the TDCS mechanism.