# Smart Healthcare Network Management: A Comprehensive Review
## 4 Smart Healthcare Network Management Protocols
### Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) in IoT for Healthcare  
SNMP operates in a manager-agent architecture, where the manager queries or modifies the state of agents. In healthcare IoT, SNMP monitors devices like wearables and medical equipment, ensuring real-time tracking of device health, usage, and alerts. SNMP enables timely responses to device failures, improving patient safety. The protocol flow is described in Algorithm 1.  
```
1:Initialize SNMP Manager and Agents with MIB definitions.
2:Establish a secure communication channel between Manager and Agents.
3:Manager sends a GET request to retrieve device status; Agent responds with data.
4:while Network is operational do
5:Manager periodically polls Agents with GET requests.
6:Agents respond with updated MIB values.
7:if the threshold is exceeded or an event occurs then
8:Agent sends a Trap notification to the Manager.
9:Manager logs and processes the event.
10:endif
11:if configuration changes are required then
12:Manager sends SET requests to modify MIB variables.
13:Agent applies changes and sends an acknowledgment.
14:endif
15:if request fails or authentication is invalid then
16:Agent responds with an error; Manager retries or logs the issue.
17:endif
18:endif
19:endwhile
20:Close the session and log activities for auditing.
```  
**Algorithm 1** SNMP protocol flow  
Let \(M\) represent the manager, \(A=\{A_{1},A_{2},\ldots,A_{n}\}\) the agents (IoT devices), and \(D_{i}(t)\) the monitored data for agent \(A_{i}\) at time \(t\). Here, \(f\) is a function representing the SNMPGET request operation, through which the manager \(M\) obtains monitored data \(D_{i}(t)\) from an agent \(A_{i}\) at time \(t\). The SNMP operations are defined as follows:  
GET operation: \[D_{i}(t)=f(M,A_{i},t)\] (1) SET operation: \[D_{i}^{\text{new}}(t)=g(M,A_{i},V(t))\] (2)  
where \(D_{i}^{\text{new}}(t)\) explicitly represents the updated monitored data after applying the new parameters \(V(t)\). Here, \(V(t)\) represents the set of parameters or configuration values provided by the manager \(M\) at time \(t\). These parameters are used in the SNMP SET operation to update or modify the settings or monitored data of the agent device \(A_{i}\).  
The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is widely used for network device monitoring and management in centralized healthcare settings, such as hospitals and medical data centers. It facilitates the remote tracking of IoT-enabled medical equipment like ventilators and infusion pumps, allowing healthcare providers to monitor their status and performance in wired, high-bandwidth hospital networks. Moreover, SNMP enhances hospital safety by generating automated alerts for critical device failures, enabling timely maintenance and reducing the risk of equipment malfunctions. This proactive management approach improves healthcare efficiency and ensures reliable medical device operation.  
However, SNMP is not well suited for resource-constrained IoT healthcare environments, such as wearable health devices, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), and home-based patient monitoring systems. Its centralized architecture and polling-based communication mechanism result in high bandwidth consumption, increased latency, and excessive energy overhead, making it inefficient for real-time monitoring in power-constrained medical IoT networks. Furthermore, frequent polling mechanisms introduce latency and unnecessary energy consumption in battery-powered medical sensors, limiting SNMP's applicability in ultra-low-power healthcare scenarios [71].