A Three-tiered Architecture for Large-scale Wireless Hospital Sensor Networks

The Utra Wide Band physical layer specified by the IEEE 802.15.4a standard [1] presents numerous advantages comparing with its original IEEE 802.15.4 standard, namely high accuracy positioning ability, high data rate up to 27 mbps, extended communication range, low power consumption and low complexity. Actually, many research and development activities focus on the design of UWB; sensor nodes entities. However nodes interactions or network configuration are neglected. For that, we propose in this paper to investigate the use of UWB for large scale Wireless Hospital Sensor Networks (WHSNs) to benefit from the advantages offered by the UWB technology. This evolving networking paradigm promises to revolutionize healthcare by allowing inexpensive, non-invasive, pervasive and ubiquitous, ambulatory health monitoring. We present the design of new system architecture, based on IEEE 802.15.4a compliant sensors, suitable for health monitoring application in high dense hospital environment. The proposed system architecture is intended to support large-scale deployment and to improve the network performance in terms of energy efficiency, real-time guarantees and Quality-of-Service (QoS).