Providing QoS for IP-Based Rural Telemedicine Systems

Ubiquity of IP has led to IP-based rural telemedicine systems. However, IP by default is designed to offer best effort packet delivery services. The IP best effort delivery services and the limited bandwidths in rural communication systems make it difficult for rural telemedicine systems to provide quality of service required by real time traffic such as interactive video and audio applications. This paper looks at quality of service requirements for typical rural telemedicine applications in order to make it suitable for real time traffic, and then proposes some mechanisms and techniques that can compensate for IP's best effort debilities to make IP capable of meeting some of these stringent requirements of real time traffic. As part of the solution service differentiation, proper scheduling, traffic engineering and fast-rerouting is considered. Lastly, the paper presents some simulation of the proposed solutions and their results as means of validation.