On the shortcoming of DTN solutions in rural mHealth applications

Abstract

The proliferation of mobile health (mHealth) technologies in rural and disconnected areas has enabled novel communication challenges. These challenges exist due to the underdeveloped Internet infrastructure, wireless intermittent connectivity, and the large data generated by such applications that often overwhelms the weak infrastructure. In this paper, we investigate data delivery in such overloaded and sparse rural area scenarios, where patients deploy an mHealth service over a disruption-tolerant network (DTN). To quantify the feasibility and the challenges of such communication scenario, we investigate the performance of multiple opportunistic forwarding algorithms under different environments and loads. We highlight the shortcoming of most of these algorithms with regards to the lack of efficient resource management algorithms and the large overhead introduced by such state-of-the-art algorithms. Our data driven experiments highlight such limitations while comparing the performance of three classes of algorithms; flooding based, resource-aware, and controlled flooding algorithms.