Transfer IPv6 packets over Bluetooth Low Energy with ensuring emergency data transmission

Abstract

Nowadays, the patient-centric healthcare service is spread to improve quality of the healthcare service and reduce the service cost. According to IBM report, the patient-centric healthcare devices should be continuously accessible through the Internet. In this respect, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is widely used as a last mile communication connecting healthcare devices to the Internet through a smartphone thanks to its long life time and lightweightness. Since the BLE does not support Internet connectivity by itself, BLE devices always need paring with the smartphone. However, if the smart phone is dead, the BLE based healthcare devices cannot access to the Internet and notify emergency data to medical center. This may threaten the life of the patient. In this paper, we propose the BLE platform suitable for the patient-centric healthcare service. We design an adaptive network platform to provide the Internet connectivity for the BLE based patient-centric healthcare devices. The platform includes two key features, (1) applying IETF 6Lo standard to enable the Internet connectivity, and (2) design of Advertising Data Transmission Protocol for ensuring emergency data transmission. By using raspberry pi and CC2540 dongle, we have implemented the prototype of the IPv6 over BLE (6BLE) platform and conducted the experiment.