Resource Allocation for Aggregate Multimedia and Healthcare Services over Heterogeneous Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Nowadays, the pervasive wireless networks enable ubiquitous high-rate wireless access from everywhere. In this work, we discuss the integration of complementary wireless techniques to construct a personal moving network. The personal wireless devices (  smartphones, camcorders, and netbooks) and even medical monitoring sensors are interconnected with a wide-area backbone through a local multi-mode gateway. The mobile nodes in a personal moving network move in group and are provided seamless connectivity through a backhaul relay channel from the local gateway toward the backbone network. In some specific scenarios, the local gateway can be as simple as a multi-radio smartphone. In this study, we investigate the construction and resource allocation for a personal moving network. Aggregate multi-service traffic of interactive data, conversational video, and electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring are considered in the resource allocation. We develop a stochastic Petri net to model the access selection scheme, which is logically clear and easy to follow. The flow-level performance is evaluated in terms of new connection blocking probability and handoff dropping probability. We further analyze the packet-level performance of the heterogeneous two-hop network. Considering the urgency of medical services, a non-preemptive priority policy is applied to mitigate the impact of background traffic and prioritize the transmission of ECG data.