Design and Evaluation of Large-Scale IoT-Enabled Healthcare Architecture

Abstract

Employment of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology in the healthcare field can contribute to recruiting heterogeneous medical devices and creating smart cooperation between them. This cooperation leads to an increase in the efficiency of the entire medical system, thus accelerating the diagnosis and curing of patients, in general, and rescuing critical cases in particular. In this paper, a large-scale IoT-enabled healthcare architecture is proposed. To achieve a wide range of communication between healthcare devices, not only are Internet coverage tools utilized but also satellites and high-altitude platforms (HAPs). In addition, the clustering idea is applied in the proposed architecture to facilitate its management. Moreover, healthcare data are prioritized into several levels of importance. Finally, NS3 is used to measure the performance of the proposed IoT-enabled healthcare architecture. The performance metrics are delay, energy consumption, packet loss, coverage tool usage, throughput, percentage of served users, and percentage of each exchanged data type. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed IoT-enabled healthcare architecture outperforms the traditional healthcare architecture.