PROtek : Jurnal Ilmiah Teknik Elektro
Vol 13 No 3 (2026): Protek : Jurnal Ilmiah Teknik Elektro

A Fog Communication Framework with Priority Queueing for Time-Critical Health Alerts in IoT Healthcare

Zaid Shakir Kadhim Al-Shammari (College of Engineering, Al-Karkh University of Science.)



Article Info

Publish Date
25 Sep 2026

Abstract

In a cloud-only Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) system, every urgent health alert must cross the wide area network twice before a clinician sees it. Those two crossings are costly. Under moderate load they use up most of the clinical time budget, and under heavy load most alerts arrive too late to be useful. A fog communication framework is presented here that addresses the problem by moving the alert decision to a gateway near the patient and by giving alert traffic strict priority over routine telemetry. The priority scheme is not a new algorithm. It is the standard three band PfifoFast queue of the Linux traffic control layer, so it can be deployed today on ordinary hardware. A single analytical model joins a log-distance wireless link, a Cobham non-preemptive priority queue at the gateway, and a hard alert deadline, and is solved in closed form for end to end latency, deadline-meet ratio, and backhaul saving. Three independent evaluators are then used: the analytical model, a 25-seed discrete event simulation, and a packet-level NS-3 simulation of the IEEE 802.15.4 access tier running the same PfifoFast queue. Traffic comes from a real vital signs dataset of 200 020 records, whose measured risk balance sets the critical and routine traffic mix. At an offered load of 0.90 the proposed design cuts mean critical-alert latency by 84.0%, from 151.7 ms to 24.2 ms, and raises deadline compliance from 60.6% to 100% against a cloud-only FIFO baseline. A paired Wilcoxon test confirms the difference (p = 5.96 x 10^-8). A factorial ablation shows that fog placement and priority scheduling help for different reasons, and that both are needed. Compared against Earliest Deadline First, which is optimal in theory, the simple stock queue reaches the same deadline reliability at far lower implementation cost. A transient test in which the critical share of traffic rises sixfold shows the guarantee still holds. Backhaul traffic falls by 95.3% at the same time.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

protk

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Control & Systems Engineering Electrical & Electronics Engineering Energy

Description

PROtek adalah jurnal ilmiah teknik elektro yang pertama kali dipublikasikan pada September 2013. Jurnal PROtek berada di bawah asuhan Program Studi Teknik Elektro Fakultas Teknik Universitas Khairun, yang merupakan wadah ilmiah untuk menyebarluaskan hasil-hasil penelitian dan kajian analisis yang ...