Potential redundant link fail-over strategies for uptime-sensitive medical telemetry applications

Abstract

For some devices and services, a consistently reliable connection to the internet is crucial; a failure to report to an internet service could result in significant financial or property damage or loss of life. We propose a solution through the development and testing of a “High-availability Internet Gateway” (HaIG) which can be installed into a network and utilise multiple redundant internet connections in order to guarantee uptime for a secure tunnel for medical devices. Three potential solutions are evaluated: Layer 2 Bonding (L2B), Multipath TCP (MPTCP) and Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP). MPTCP and L2B were found to be less suitable than SCTP at providing a reliable, high-availability fail-over solution. We incorporated the SCTP-based solution into a consumer networking device running OpenWRT, and used controlled testbed trials to demonstrate the use of redundant internet connections for providing a high-availability connection for applications such as remote cardiac monitoring.