On QoS Provisioning in Context-Aware Wireless Sensor Networks for Healthcare

Wireless body sensors combined with ubiquitous Wireless Sensor Networks enable pervasive healthcare applications. This technology can significantly improve the quality of life of chronically ill and elderly. Remote medical monitoring applications consist of many features as continuous medical monitoring, emergency alerts, location tracking and home automation. These heterogeneous systems have to implement Quality of Service mechanisms to ensure that the different functions have their QoS requirements satisfied, that the most important traffic still has its QoS requirements fulfilled in case of network overload and finally that QoS mechanisms are able to adapt dynamically depending on the context. From our knowledge, QoS provisioning in wireless sensor networks for healthcare has never been studied from the context-awareness specific perspective, although context-awareness is the core issue of WSN for healthcare and that these networks have specific characteristics in comparison with most WSN. Health monitoring applications demand high reliability as life of human beings is involved, therefore Quality of Service support in such systems is vital. As patient may evolve from a non-critical health status to a critical one, context-awareness is essential to adapt the network performance to the new situation. In this paper we study the specific QoS requirements of healthcare applications. Then, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of related work regarding these characteristics and context-awareness. Finally, we point out remaining challenges and open research issues.