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