A Truthful Mechanism for Delay-Dependent Prioritized Medical Packet Transmission Scheduling

In this paper, the management of medical packet transmissions in electronic health (e-health) networks is studied. Unlike most existing works, we focus on beyond wireless body area network (beyond-WBANs) communications, i.e., data transmissions between WBAN-gateways (e.g., smart phones) and the base station of remote medical centers, and consider a delay-dependent prioritized transmission scheduling which jointly takes into account both the criticality of medical packets and their starving time (i.e., experienced delays). In our model, medical packets are randomly aggregated at WBAN-gateways, and their transmission requests are reported to the base station with different priority class information. The base station manages the beyond-WBAN transmissions following a constructed queueing system with a delay-dependent priority discipline. For maximizing the network social welfare while preventing unexpected strategic behaviors from smart gateways, we design a truthful and efficient mechanism, called DPMT. Theoretical and simulation results examine the feasibility of the proposed mechanism and demonstrate its superiority over counterparts.