Criticality-Driven Scheduling for UAV-Assisted Remote Health Monitoring System

Abstract

The rapid development of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) based remote healthcare system allows real-time patient health monitoring. However, during emergency situations, direct transmission of health data to a cloud server may be challenging due to network connectivity issues or the remote location of the cloud server. In such scenarios, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) can collect patient health data and transmit it to a cloud server for monitoring their health conditions. Moreover, when UAV transmits health data, it is crucial to prioritize critical patient data over regular data, especially when resources are limited. Therefore, an effective scheduling algorithm for transmitting health data packets is required while considering criticality and data size capacity constraints. To address these challenges, we formulate an optimization problem by maximizing the system utility, calculated as the weighted sum of the utility of patients and the utility of Service Provider (SP) while considering the criticality of health data altogether. We propose the Prioritized Transmission Scheduling (PTS) algorithm for the prioritized transmission of health data packets from patients. Furthermore, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed PTS algorithm through extensive simulations on various parameters and compare its performance with other state-of-the-art techniques. © 2023 IEEE.