Quality of service support in wireless sensor networks for emergency healthcare services

Abstract

The reliable and efficient operation of emergency healthcare (e-emergency) services poses quality demands to the systems and underlying communication infrastructures. In this context, most existing wireless body sensor networks fall short in meeting these demands as they only offer an unreliable service delivery. e-Emergency systems must provide quality of service (QoS) support so that a pervasive and trustable assistance is provided to patients under health risk. This paper discusses the need for QoS in wireless e-health and e-emergency services. To demonstrate this need, some current and relevant e-health projects with QoS requirements are presented. The study reveals the importance of providing QoS support in this emerging field of application and provides a summary characterizing the e-health proposals herein presented.

Secure and quality of service assurance scheduling scheme for WBAN with application to eHealth

“…The QoS is ensured by providing high reliability of message delivery. Gama et al [9] present a low power real time (LPRT) protocol to fulfill the QoS requirements of an eHealth care system. Authors briefly describe why QoS needs in eHealth care system with a case study [9].…”

An Adaptive Relay Transmission Scheme for Reliable Data Forwarding in Wireless Body Area Networks

“…The time-varying nature of the channel depends on the replacement of the transceivers on/in the human body and body movements. Therefore, a simple one-hop topology is not sufficient to provide QoS requirements of applications [4] since a strong path loss and shadowing occurs.…”

“…They may be placed on clothes, on the body, or under the skin to collect vital signs such as heartbeat, body temperature, blood pressure, and electromyogram, etc. [4]. Because information of the vital signs relates with human lives, it must to be transmitted with very high quality of service (QoS) requirements.…”

Towards a Patient-Centered Collaborative Health Care System Model

“…But, the need for quality of service support in wireless ehealth and e-emergency services is very important [8]. So, these systems have to provide quality of service support such guarantee for bandwidth, reliability, end-to-end delay, jitter and loss.…”