EWPS: Emergency Data Communication in the Internet of Medical Things

In this article, we explore the remote monitoring of patients in an on-demand service that can be implemented using the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). Network congestion and delay are important issues that must be resolved to handle emergencies in IoMT. Backpressure scheduling is a well-known scheme to resolve network congestion and improve network throughput for emergency data packets. Traditional backpressure scheduling is known to categorize each packet and schedules emergency packets to be forwarded faster than regular packets. However, in large-scale networks, these scheduling algorithms find unnecessarily long paths. This leads to high end-to-end delay and decreases the performance of guaranteed delivery. To resolve these issues, this article proposes an event-aware priority scheduling algorithm for data packets. This model follows a single priority queue model to manage all packets and emergency packets have been identified by the threshold values. Also, a separate communication path has been identified as well to reduce the waiting time for each category of the packet. Meanwhile, to reduce delay in packet communication, a delay-efficient data aggregation tree is constructed, which is combined with the priority queue model. Our in-depth simulation results of the proposed model prove the novel contribution to reducing delay in emergency packet delivery and avoiding network congestion. Moreover, the proposed model is also compared with the existing state-of-the-art models to show its ability to outperform similar methodologies.