A Model for QoS-aware Wireless Communication in Hospitals

Abstract

Abstract

In recent decade, the research regarding wireless applications in e-Health services has increased. Simple communications, fast delivery of medical information, reducing treatment cost and reducing the medical workers error rate, are the main benefits of using wireless technologies in e-Health applications. But on the other hand using wireless technologies causes the electromagnetic interference (EMI) problem. Although power management and reducing transmission power is an effective method to avoid the EMI, but it causes the number of successful message deliveries to the AP to decreases, and hence, the quality of service (QoS) requirements cannot be meet. In this paper, we first introduce QoS requirements in different medical data transmissions, and then two approaches for power management in sensitive healthcare environments are presented and its effect on the interference and outages are investigated. In the rest of this paper, we propose the use of relays for decreasing the probability of outage in aforementioned scenario. Relay placement is the main factor to enjoy the usefulness of relay station benefits in network, so we use the genetic algorithm to compute the optimum positions of a fixed number of relays. We have considered delay and maximum blind point coverage as two main criteria in relay station problem. Finally the performance of proposed method is investigated.