Bridging Health Information Exchange Gaps Among Health Practitioners in Underserved Areas Using Delay-Tolerant Networks

Abstract

The term delay-tolerant networking is invented to describe and encompass all types of long-delay, disconnected, disrupted or intermittently-connected networks, where mobility and outages or scheduled contacts may be experienced. Due to low telecommunication infrastructures coverage in major parts of the country, intermittent connectivity and absence of end-to-end connectivity is the potential problem for the health practitioners in underserved areas to exchange health information among each other in common or with the specialists using communication links. As a result, health practitioners in underserved areas serving the majority of the population are unable to exchange health information in communal and also isolated from specialist support this in turn hampering the health care centers from providing better health care services. The main objective of this study is to bridge the health information exchange gaps among health practitioners in underserved areas using delay-tolerant network mechanisms based on the proposed framework. As health care centers (hospitals) are located sparsely, using flooding-based routing algorithm is the best option in order to achieve high message delivery probability. But the flooding-based routing scheme incurs buffer overflows as a nodes buffer size is limited in reality. Thus, the researcher proposed a buffer management approach named Epidemic Routing based on Message Replication Rate Priority (ERMRRP) to manage the limited buffer space of nodes. For the simulation Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) Simulator is used. The existing routing algorithm and the proposed routing algorithm approach has been evaluated. They were analyzed on three different metrics namely delivery probability, average latency and overhead ratio. The simulation results obtained in this thesis show that for the proposed routing approach, the message delivery probability is very high, minimum overhead and high average latency (as a tradeoff due to computation at buffer checker in preparing room and priority for transmission) when the nodes buffer get constrained. However, when there is sufficient buffer space, both epidemic and proposed routing approach shows comparable performance in terms of delivery probability and Average latency