Wearable computing is becoming a more and more attracting field in the last years thanks to the miniaturisation of electronic devices. Wearable healthcare monitoring systems (WHMS) as an important client of wearable computing technology has gained a lot. Indeed, the wearable sensors and their surrounding healthcare applications bring a lot of benefits to patients, elderly people and medical staff, so facilitating their daily life quality. But from a research point of view, there is still work to accomplish in order to overcome the gap between hardware and software parts. In this paper, we target the problem of congestion control when all these healthcare sensed data have to reach the destination in a reliable manner that avoids repetitive transmission which wastes precious energy or leads to loss of important information in emergency cases, too. We propose a congestion control scheme CCS_WHMS that ensures efficient and fair data delivery while used in the body wearable system part or in the multi-hop inter bodies wearable ones to get the destination. As the congestion detection paradigm is very important in the control process, we do experimental tests to compare between state of the art congestion detection methods, using MICAz motes, in order to choose the appropriate one for our scheme.
Keywords: Body area networks; Congestion control; Congestion detection; Wearable health monitoring systems; Wireless sensor networks.