Delay and size-dependent priority-aware scheduling for IoT-based healthcare traffic using heterogeneous multi-server priority queueing system

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) based healthcare applications are time-sensitive and any delay can cause alarming situations, including death of patients. The Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheduling scheme has been proposed for use in IoT-based healthcare applications. However, the EDF scheme performs poorly under overloaded conditions due to giving highest priority to packets that are close to missing their deadlines. Some studies have proposed the use of Priority EDF to overcome the challenges of EDF; however, Priority EDF still favours higher priority queues which increases the waiting times of lower priority queues. In order to overcome the limitation of EDF and its variants, this paper proposes a system model for a prioritized scheduling (PS) scheme. The PS scheme is an improvement of the Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheme and its variants for IoT-based healthcare applications. The PS scheme uses a heterogeneous multi-server priority queuing system to provide service differentiation by prioritizing short packets over large packets and delay sensitive packets are serviced before delay tolerant packets. Numerical results demonstrate that the PS scheme minimizes the mean slowdown for both delay sensitive short and large packets at low and high load values. Additionally, the PS scheme performs better than the EDF and Priority EDF schemes in terms of reducing mean slowdown of packets and the PS scheme performs better than the EDF in terms of throughput for all packet sizes at both low and high load values. The performance improvement in terms of throughput is more pronounced at high load values. This addresses the challenge of the EDF scheme which performs poorly under overloaded conditions and the challenge of the Priority EDF scheme which favours higher priority queues at the expense of low priority queues.