FlexiHealth: flexible softwarized networks for digital healthcare

Conventional health monitoring applications were focusing on the use of static physiological sensors, whereas future health applications empowered by IoT devices will require mobility of nodes. Thus, it is more common to experience existence of both static and mobile nodes within the network. The efforts on standardizing Internet Protocols were neglecting mobility management protocols. Most standard mobility management protocols such as Mobile IPv6 and its variants have high signaling overhead owing to tunneling and binding operations and are considerably complex, incurring high processing overhead. Additionally, the current standard mobility management protocols are neglecting constrained networks with limitations in channel bandwidth, packet size, sleep mode and unreliable links.

FlexiHealth focuses on designing novel mobility management protocols for IoT networks through enhancing the IoT architecture, enriching by the Fog computing concept. We are envisioning a mobility management solution for constrained networks that encompasses (i) efficient hand-off algorithms for smooth transitions of mobile nodes through a cooperative decision making by the mobile node and the software defined networking controller, and (ii) efficient localization algorithms for mobile IoT networks by getting the advantage of SDN controller. This project will involve extensive simulations and real-world experiments for verification.