Priority-Aware Scheduling for High-Dense Healthcare IoT (H-IoT) Networks Using Message-Passing Algorithm

Healthcare Internet of Things (H-IoT) has been rigorously extending its applications to hospitals to deliver important medical data remotely and continuously with various types of smart medical sensors. Medical data of patients should be treated with different urgency levels. Specifically, critical medical data, such as data pertaining, to heart failure or fall risk must be transmitted first with the highest priority. Thus, priority-aware scheduling for H-IoT networks is required to improve the quality of medical services. However, due to the high-dense nature of H-IoT networks, interference and packet collisions can make finding the optimal priority-aware scheduling very challenging. To tackle these practical issues, we develop a priority-aware scheduling algorithm based on a message-passing framework. With a message-passing procedure that relies on a max-product rule, the proposed algorithm simultaneously maximizes the priority metric and throughput of the network. In addition, the proposed algorithm efficiently finds the best scheduling configuration without a central coordinator by enabling low complexity and autonomous decisions of each network node. Our simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm outperforms conventional schemes in terms of priority awareness, throughput performance, and network scalability.