Performance Management on Multiple Communication Paths for Portable Assisted Living

Recent advances in healthcare devices and communication technologies make user remote monitoring and ubiquitous alert transmission possible. However, ensuring fast and continuous transmission of health-related data is paramount, once the information may relate to a life-threatening condition. In this context, using multiple communication paths to data transfer allows multihomed portable devices to improve network performance. But, jointly managing multiple communication paths and supporting device portability results in a challenge. This paper presents a Portable Assisted Living System (PALS) that manages performance on communication and extends the monitoring area of users in the context of Ambient Assisted Living. It relies on multipath transport-layer protocols to support multiple communication paths and to accomplish simultaneous use of paths, yielding performance and mobility gains. Emulation results show that PALS provides a bandwidth utilization efficiency of up to 87% under scenarios of high packet loss ratio.