A model for QoS - Aware wireless communication in hospitals

Abstract

In the recent decade, research regarding wireless applications in electronic health (e-Health) services has been increasing. The main benefits of using wireless technologies in e-Health applications are simple communications, fast delivery of medical information, reducing treatment cost and also reducing the medical workers′ error rate. However, using wireless communications in sensitive healthcare environment raises electromagnetic interference (EMI). One of the most effective methods to avoid the EMI problem is power management. To this end, some of methods have been proposed in the literature to reduce EMI effects in health care environments. However, using these methods may result in nonaccurate interference avoidance and also may increase network complexity. To overcome these problems, we introduce two approaches based on per-user location and hospital sectoring for power management in sensitive healthcare environments. Although reducing transmission power could avoid EMI, it causes a number of successful message deliveries to the access point to decrease and, hence, the quality of service requirements cannot be meet. In this paper, we propose the use of relays for decreasing the probability of outage in the aforementioned scenario. Relay placement is the main factor to enjoy the usefulness of relay station benefits in the network and, therefore, 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. The performance of the proposed method in outage reduction is investigated through simulations.

Keywords

• EMI problem
• outage reduction
• power management
• wireless communications