Providing QoS in ubiquitous telemedicine networks

Wireless LANs will play a critical role in providing anywhere and anytime connectivity for ubiquitous telemedicine applications. This paper focuses on how to provide QoS over the wireless channel between the body sensor network (BSN) gateway and the wireless access points (e.g., wireless hotspots in various locations). In the telemedicine application, it usually requires the periodic data and the data related to the occurrence of emergencies to be reported to the remote health care in a timely manner. Unlike the traditional QoS techniques which support voice and data applications, the sporadic nature of the emergency data in telemedicine systems makes it nontrivial to provide sufficient QoS support. In this paper, we first investigated several alternative schemes for emergency QoS support in the telemedicine systems. An express dual channel (EDC) based QoS provisioning mechanism is then proposed. Not only is the proposed mechanism simple and resource efficient, but also it provides the minimum delay for the unpredictable emergency data transmission. Simulation results show the proposed EDC based solution provides satisfactory QoS for ubiquitous telemedicine applications.