Estimating the impact of adding sensor nodes to biomedical wireless sensor networks

Biomedical wireless sensor networks enable the development of real-time patient monitoring systems, either to monitor chronically ill persons in their homes or to monitor patients in step-down hospital units. However, due to the critical nature of medical data, these networks have to meet demanding quality of service requirements, ensuring high levels of confidence to their users. These goals depend on several factors, such as the characteristics of the network deployment area or the network topology. In such context, this work proposes a method to find the best network physical topology in order to maximise the quality of service provided by the network. The proposed method makes use of “virtual sensor nodes” to estimate the impact of adding real sensor nodes to the network in a specific location. Thus, assessing different locations, it is possible to find the best location to place the new sensor node while maximising the quality of service provided by the network. In particular, this work studies the feasibility of using “virtual sensor nodes” to assess the impact of adding a new sensor node to a biomedical wireless sensor network and presents some results showing the viability of the proposed method.