Quality of Service consideration for the wireless telemedicine and e-health services.

Zvikhachevskaya, Anna and Markarian, Garik and Mihaylova, Lyudmila (2009) Quality of Service consideration for the wireless telemedicine and e-health services. In: IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, 2009. WCNC 2009. :. IEEE, Budapest, Hungary, pp. 1-6. ISBN 978-1-4244-2947-9

Abstract

In this article we investigate the application of IEEE 802.11 wireless standard to QoS (Quality of Service) support within wireless e-health/telemedicine services. The stringent requirements and real-time nature of medical application introduce the need for QoS provisioning in wireless medical networks. The quick delivery of a patient’s measurements is an extremely important as well as reliability in terms of data delivery in the emergency care. Another important issue for wireless e-health applications is the mobility support. An ambulance, which is moving through different e-health domains, supporting different e-health applications the connectivity between the monitoring applications with the medical data source may be assured by the different wireless technologies. An overview of the e-health technologies and wireless telemedicine systems are presented and some open research problems are identified. A survey on QoS provisioning in wireless e-health, handoff schemes for QoS support in wireless networks, the scheme of priority for elemedicine/e-health services and techniques/methods for IEEE 802.11 to guarantee QoS is also provided. The simple ehealth scenario is when the user has the possibility to have ‘communication anywhere’ within the mobile network. The technology which is in use has to provide services that would reduce patient journeys, hospital visits and hospital admissions, and would save the time of healthcare professionals, as well as would support individuals living at home and improve the quality or effectiveness of the care or treatment that is delivered. The basic requirements for the different types of application are presented spatially for the ehealth/ telemedicine services. To this end, we present emergency situation scenarios, designed as a possible e-health emergency scenario. Resource allocation for e-health application is inherited in many aspects including the offered services, traffic requirements, propagation’s characteristics and network structure. Within medical networks [1] delay is a critical factor, since there are many cases in which a communication should be timely in order to save the life of critical patient. This paper presents architecture and novel scenarios for QoS provisioning in emergency telemedicine. Some performance evaluation results are obtained by simulations.