1 research outputs found
Performance evaluation of cooperation strategies for m-health services and applications
Health telematics are becoming a major improvement for patients’ lives, especially for
disabled, elderly, and chronically ill people. Information and communication technologies have
rapidly grown along with the mobile Internet concept of anywhere and anytime connection.
In this context, Mobile Health (m-Health) proposes healthcare services delivering, overcoming
geographical, temporal and even organizational barriers. Pervasive and m-Health services aim
to respond several emerging problems in health services, including the increasing number of
chronic diseases related to lifestyle, high costs in existing national health services, the need
to empower patients and families to self-care and manage their own healthcare, and the need
to provide direct access to health services, regardless the time and place. Mobile Health (m-
Health) systems include the use of mobile devices and applications that interact with patients
and caretakers. However, mobile devices have several constraints (such as, processor, energy,
and storage resource limitations), affecting the quality of service and user experience. Architectures
based on mobile devices and wireless communications presents several challenged issues
and constraints, such as, battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections,
noises, limited bandwidths, and network delays. In this sense, cooperation-based
approaches are presented as a solution to solve such limitations, focusing on increasing network
connectivity, communication rates, and reliability. Cooperation is an important research topic
that has been growing in recent years. With the advent of wireless networks, several recent
studies present cooperation mechanisms and algorithms as a solution to improve wireless networks
performance. In the absence of a stable network infrastructure, mobile nodes cooperate
with each other performing all networking functionalities. For example, it can support intermediate
nodes forwarding packets between two distant nodes.
This Thesis proposes a novel cooperation strategy for m-Health services and applications.
This reputation-based scheme uses a Web-service to handle all the nodes reputation and networking
permissions. Its main goal is to provide Internet services to mobile devices without
network connectivity through cooperation with neighbor devices. Therefore resolving the above
mentioned network problems and resulting in a major improvement for m-Health network architectures
performances. A performance evaluation of this proposal through a real network
scenario demonstrating and validating this cooperative scheme using a real m-Health application
is presented. A cryptography solution for m-Health applications under cooperative environments,
called DE4MHA, is also proposed and evaluated using the same real network scenario and
the same m-Health application. Finally, this work proposes, a generalized cooperative application
framework, called MobiCoop, that extends the incentive-based cooperative scheme for
m-Health applications for all mobile applications. Its performance evaluation is also presented
through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating MobiCoop using different mobile
applications