Hybrid network combining PLC and IEEE802.16 for hospital environment

This paper presents a novel hospital network which delivers broadband with Quality of Service (QoS) guaranteed by IEEE 802.16/WiMAX and Power Line Communication (PLC) systems. Through the utilization of the QoS features of IEEE 802.16 and PLC systems jointly, the proposed system enables simultaneous transmission of various types of medical data traffic while remaining the advantages of operation flexibility and low deployment cost. Performance is evaluated to demonstrate that the proposed network not only provides throughput guarantee, but also considers QoS requirement of the medical applications.