Adopting MQTT for a multi protocols IoMT system

Abstract

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) altered the way of caregiving and the new pandemic forced the health systems to adopt new treatment protocols in which remote follow-up is essential. This paper introduces a proposed system to link a remote healthcare unit as it is inside the hospital. Two different network protocols; a global system for mobile communication (GSM) and Wi-Fi were used to simulate the heath data transfer from the two different geographical locations, using Raspberry Pi development board and Microcontroller units. Message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol was employed to transfer the measured data from the healthcare unit to the hospital’s Gateway. The gateway is used to route the aggregated health data from healthcare units to the hospital server, doctors’ dashboards, and the further processing. The system was successfully implemented and tested, where the experimental tests show that the remote healthcare units using a GSM network consumed about 900 mWh. A high percentage of success data packets transfer was recorded within the network framework as it reaches 99.89% with an average round trip time (RTT) of 7.5 milliseconds and a data transfer rate up to 12.3 kbps.