On the effectiveness of congestion control mechanisms for remote healthcare monitoring system in IoT environment — A review

A progressive advancement in biosensors and wireless technology are the major contributors to the realization of continuous remote health monitoring system (RHMS). Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is part of this technology due to the deployment of multiple sensors such as Electrocardiogram (ECG) to collect vital body signals for processing and diagnosis. Among the benefits offered by this technology include remote monitoring of patient's health status and early detection of abnormalities in the collected signals. Once detected, several preventive measurements can be taken. However, this system needs to encounter some challenges in the wireless network such as delay, packet loss and throughput due to network congestion when transmitting and receiving a bulk of multiple data. Generally, the presence of these problems in transmitting vital body signals may result in incorrect medical diagnosing which can increase mortality rate and cause severe impact to the overall system's performance. Thus, a suitable design of congestion control mechanism is urgently needed in designing a reliable and efficient remote health monitoring system.