Quality of Service in Wireless e-Emergency: Main Issues and a Case-study

Oscar Gama1, Paulo Carvalho1, J. A. Afonso2 and P. M. Mendes2

Universidade do Minho, Campus de Gualtar1
Departamento de Informática
P-4710-057 Braga, Portugal

E-mail: {osg,pmc} at di.uminho.pt

Universidade do Minho, Campus de Azurém2
Departamento de Electrónica Industrial
P-4800-058 Guimarães, Portugal

E-mail: {jose.afonso,paulo.mendes} at dei.uminho.pt


Abstract

Due to its critical nature, emergency healthcare (e-emergency) systems should be totally reliable, efficient and support real-time traffic. Therefore e-emergency networks must provide proper quality of service (QoS) levels. After assessing the relevance of QoS deployment in different e-health contexts, this paper presents a pragmatic case-study intended to be deployed in a hospital room containing patients with high risk abnormalities, whose vital signals are being monitored by personal wireless body sensor networks. After justifying the unsuitability of ZigBee standard in this e-emergency scenario, the use of Low-Power, Real-Time (LPRT) protocol for wireless sensor networks, is proposed as an adequate candidate for such task. For the present case-study, the protocol is able to fulfill quantitatively the required QoS levels.
Keywords  e-Health - e-Emergency - WSN - QoS - TDMA
UCAmI'08, Salamanca, Spain, 2008