QoS Provisioning in Sensor Enabled Telemedicine Networks

Enabled by the advances of the wireless sensor network technologies, wireless LANs will play a critical role in providing ubiquitous connectivity for future 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 (AP). Telemedicine applications require the periodic report data and the emergency messages transmitted to the remote health care center in a timely manner. However, unlike the voice and multimedia applications which can be supported by traditional QoS techniques, the sporadic nature of the emergency data in telemedicine systems makes it nontrivial to provide sufficient QoS. This article investigates several alternative schemes for QoS support in the telemedicine systems, and an express dual channel (EDC) based QoS mechanism is proposed. Not only is the proposed mechanism simple and resource efficient, but also it provides the bounded maximum delay guarantee for the unpredictable emergency data transmission for telemedicine applications.