Adaptive forwarding of mHealth data in challenged networks

Abstract

With the advancements in mobile sensors and health-care technologies, mobile health (mHealth) services are growing in demand. However, the deployment of mHealth's applications in rural and underdeveloped areas remains a major challenge, despite the investments made, largely due to unreliable communication infrastructures. In this paper, we propose delivering mHealth data in a highly disruptive wireless network using resource-limited mobile devices. We build on state-of-the-art opportunistic/DTN solutions, and propose two dynamic schemes that adapt to the level of congestion in the network. Our adaptive forwarding schemes dynamically tune data replication at forwarder nodes by engaging the most appropriate forwarding strategy at any given state, while incurring minimal overhead. In order to achieve such a goal, we propose a reactive and proactive approach to detecting or predicting congestion in the network respectively. We perform a set of data-driven simulations to compare the performance of our proposed schemes with state-of-the-art DTN forwarding algorithms. Our results show that our schemes achieve better delivery ratio for realistic mHealth applications in challenged networking environments. 2017 IEEE.