An efficient producer mobility management technique for real-time communication in NDN-based Remote Health Monitoring systems

The Remote Health Monitoring (RHM) system is a remote healthcare platform that provides real-time monitoring services and brings convenience and safety for doctors as well as patients. Named Data Network (NDN) is a future network architecture, which is a kind of Information-Centric Network. NDN's advantages in data security and performance can make the health system more reliable and efficient. However, in the existing NDN network architecture, there exist some producer mobility issues that can impede the proceeding towards real-time and seamless communication. To solve the problem, a Neighborhood Registration Scheme (NRS) is proposed here. When the mobile producer moves from one AP to another, it has not registered into the new AP and thus cannot receive the Interest Packet (IntP) from the consumer in time, which can cause data losses. Meanwhile, the updating process in the NDN map also takes a considerable time, which can also cause delay, referred to as updating delay. This is due to some consumers having got the new location of the mobile producer while others have not. The scheme proposes in this paper is to register the mobile producer not only into the nearest Access Point (AP) but also multiple neighbor APs. In this way, the delay caused by AP switching and package loss rate can be effectively reduced, which allows mobile producers to move across the cells with low latency and Packet Loss (PL) rate. NRS is a comprehensive routing algorithm that designs the modified packet transmission strategy. Compare to the Anchor-less strategy, the proposed NRS decreases about 80% PL rate and saves 16% delay time, whereas, NRS reduces more than 90% PL rate and saves 40% delay time than Hop-count strategy in high-speed producer mobility scenarios. These improvements are necessary for RHM because low delay and PL are the most important requirements of the RHM that can strengthen the real-time monitoring for patients, information interaction between doctors and patients, and safety assurance. By setting the proper parameters, NRS can promise to have no PL and acceptable network cost.