Availability and Performance Assessment of IoMT Systems: A Stochastic Modeling Approach

Internet of Things (IoT) allows distinct elements of an environment to be remotely monitored using existing network infrastructures, creating a prominent integration of disparate computing systems. Such an integration commonly results in efficient data collection and processing. Indeed, the adoption of IoT can improve communication in gathering and transmitting data, especially in locations that deal with connectivity challenges. For instance, hospitals have adopted IoT to collect and transmit patient data to health professionals, as critical patients must be monitored uninterruptedly. As a consequence, healthcare systems typically require high availability, in which connectivity is essential for critical medical decisions. Some works have conceived techniques to assess the availability of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) systems, but the joint assessment of performance and availability is generally neglected. This paper presents a modeling approach based on stochastic Petri nets (SPN) and reliability block diagrams (RBD) to evaluate IoMT systems. The proposed technique evaluates availability and response time of the communication between devices in an IoMT architecture. Experimental results show the practical feasibility of the proposed approach, in which a sensitivity analysis is adopted to indicate the components with the most significant impact on the system operation. Our approach contributes to the state of the art as an additional technique to evaluate different system designs before modifying or implementing the real system or a prototype.