QoS deployment in wireless e-health and e-emergency : main issues and a case-study

• Author(s): Gama, Oscar ; Carvalho, Paulo ; Afonso, José A. ; Mendes, P. M.
• Date: 2008
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/9340
• Origin: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
• Subject(s): e-health; e-emergency; WSN; QoS
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

Due to its critical nature, emergency healthcare (e-emergency) systems should be totally reliable, efficient and support real-time traffic. Therefore eemergency 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.