Internet of Things based Wireless Sensor Network - WiFi Coexistence in Medical Applications

Abstract

With an advent of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, the potential and advantages of IoT technology in health and environmental services are becoming more apparent, allowing service quality to be improved via the use of devices and sensors. For health applications, an optimization technique is used to optimize IoT-based network connectivity using wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and smart connected sensors. Continuous health monitoring is necessary to monitor and send the patients’ data continuously to the hospital’s information system which it is located at another location using an existing hospital’s wireless local area network. This study evaluates the influence of WLAN when it was added to WSN which it represented by IEEE802.25.4 ZigBee sensors and how the coexistence occurs because Wifi and ZigBee operated on the same channel. The study was performed using Riverbed Modeler Academic edition (v17.5) in number of modeled scenarios. The collected results showed that the coexistence of Wi-Fi degrade the ZigBee network performance in terms of throughput, delay, and data dropped in some applications such as: (File transfer, Web browsing and Database Access). The increasing number of PCs in Wifi-ZigBee network with a suitable choice of routing topology could improve the performance of the proposed network.