Controle de fluxo adaptativo para gateways bluetooth low-energy aplicado a sistemas de monitoramento remoto de pacientes.

Abstract

The Internet of Things paradigm enables a new set of applications and services to be available in the Internet. This scenario makes possible the development of new low-power communication technologies, such asBluetooth Low-Energy (BLE), which creates wireless Personal Area Networks (PAN). At the same time, the rising availability of Personal Health Devices (PHD) capable of PAN communication and the desire of keeping a high quality of live are the ingredients of the Connected Health vision. However, as the number of PHDs increase, the number of other peripherals connected in the PAN also increases. Therefore, PHDs are now competing for medium access with other devices, decreasing the network Quality of Service of health applications in the BLE PAN, as these networks do not guarantee Quality of Service requirements for connected devices. In this context, where a BLEPAN is shared with multiple devices, it is where this work is immersed. In this work is presented an approach for adaptive flow-control of BLE Gateways using a temporal credit distribution mechanism between clients in a PAN. For this distribution, application context information is used for network prioritization and parameter configuration of PAN devices. In this work is detailed how the adaptive flow-control was designed and how was its architectural evolution, detailing how its temporal mechanism works. Experimental results are presented showing the controller behavior in different scenarios. These results show that using the proposed approach it is possible to guarantee Quality of Service requirements for target devices using a prioritization process in a shared medium. In order to validate this work in a broad scenario, it is also presented a standard-based Remote Patient Monitoring System architecture for the Internet of Things. This system is used as base infrastructure for prioritization of PHDs connections based on their state and requirements by the use of a Smart BLE Gateway. An implementation was developed showing the relevance of the problem and how a BLE adaptive controller can assist in the prioritization of devices in the context of healthcare services and applications.