Use of wireless system in healthcare for developing countries

Healthcare is one of the major applications of wireless systems that possess crucial issues. Specifically developing countries require a low cost and reliable network with efficient protocols. The most challenging concern of Body Area Network (BAN) is heterogeneity, which requires fairness with reliability among all the network nodes. Solutions proposed for these networks either do not provide fair packet transmission or consume high energy and introduce delays. In this paper, we propose a cross layer protocol for healthcare applications meeting the requirements and challenges of the heterogeneous BAN. The protocol is also feasible for developing countries as it can be implemented over existing wireless infrastructure and provides high network reliability with energy efficiency through cooperation and adaptability. Results show that the proposed scheme improves reliability, throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), and energy consumption for scalable and mobile networks over conventional BAN protocols.