# A Network Architecture and Routing Protocol for the MEDIcal WARNING System
## 8 Conclusions  
This paper discusses the MEDIWARN communication system and a simple, lightweight and configurable routing protocol specifically designed for the needs of the MEDIWARN system. The MEDIWARN communication system provides mobility support and high reliability, through path redundancy and message replication, thanks to the use of relay nodes and the dynamic routing policies of the MP-RPM.  
Simulation and experimental results in the assessed scenario demonstrate that the maximum RTT values are always in the order of hundreds of milliseconds, thus fulfilling the requirements of the MEDIWARN system, and that, thanks to the multipath support, the PLR values measured during the experimental assessment were always below 4%. Such values are due to the noisy environment in which the experimental assessment was performed. In fact, simulating the same scenario using the log-normal shadowing channel model, with the parameters obtained from experimental measures in hospitals, zero packet loss was obtained.  
One of the limitations of the proposed system is that some relay nodes may eventually become overloaded, when they have to relay a high number of transmissions. As the communication system and the routing protocol were designed to be easily extended with new functionalities, to solve this issue, future works will deal with enhancing the MEDIWARN communication system by introducing load balancing techniques [42] in the MP-RPM. In addition, an extensive performance evaluation of the MEDIWARN communication system will be carried out in scenarios with a higher number of rooms and more patients per room, so that a larger deployment of the MEDIWARN communication system will be assessed. Finally, a comparative performance evaluation of several message priority assignment policies will be performed, with the aim to further reduce the delays of the messages transmitted by the nodes that are a large number of hops away from the MEDIWARN Virtual Biosensor.  
Conceptualization, L.L., L.L.B., G.P. and O.R.; methodology, L.L., L.L.B. and G.P.; software, L.L. and O.R.; validation, L.L.; investigation, L.L., L.L.B. and G.P.; writing--original draft preparation, L.L.; writing--review and editing, L.L.B. and G.P.; supervision, L.L.B.; and funding acquisition, L.L.B. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research was funded by the INTERREG V-A Italy-Malta Programme 2014-2020, through the \"MEDIWARN--Virtual Biosensor for Medical Warning Precursors\" European Project (CUP E69F1800000005).  
The data underlying this article will be shared on reasonable request from the corresponding author.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**End Node** & **AODV** & **DSDV** & **MP-RPM** \\ \hline N1 & 24.55\(\%\pm 2.80\%\) & 0.78\(\%\pm 0.60\%\) & 0\% \\ N2 & 25.33\(\%\pm 3.54\%\) & 1.65\(\%\pm 0.87\%\) & 0\% \\ N3 & 26.77\(\%\pm 3.75\%\) & 5.87\(\%\pm 0.91\%\) & 0\% \\ N4 & 27.80\(\%\pm 2.96\%\) & 17.93\(\%\pm 1.31\%\) & 0\% \\ N5 & 33.97\(\%\pm 5.75\%\) & 38.36\(\%\pm 1.99\%\) & 0\% \\ N6 & 47.38\(\%\pm 1.75\%\) & 57.57\(\%\pm 1.96\%\) & 0\% \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 5: Packet Loss Ratio simulation results for each end node.