Wireless body sensor networks with cloud computing capability for pervasive healthcare: Research directions and possible solutions

Abstract

In pervasive healthcare services, the efficient management of the large number of monitored data from various wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) in terms of processing, storing and analysis is an important problem. Now, cloud computing is becoming a promising technology to provide a flexible stack of massive computing, storage and software services in a scalable and virtualized manner at low cost. In this article, we try to investigate and overcome these issues associated with WBSN-cloud integration (abbr. bCloud) platform. For this purpose, we design a novel system architecture for the general bCloud platform, and then propose the methodologies for quality of service (QoS) improvement, including three directions: reliable and energy efficient routing protocols for WBSNs, effective QoS-aware novel resource allocation model for the bCloud platform, and efficient data mining for extracting behavioral regularity from WBSN data. The proposed methodologies to design bCloud platform will facilitate the better pervasive healthcare. © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014.