Efficient Resource Allocation in Tactile-Capable Ethernet Passive Optical Healthcare LANs

Abstract

Communication networks for healthcare environments support various application types and should be capable of providing them with the required Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of reliable data delivery, considerable data rate and low latency. The introduction of Tactile Internet (TI) healthcare applications is expected to upgrade the level of provided services to patients. The requirements of these applications are very stringent and a major requirement is that the existing network infrastructure must support them. Passive Optical Networks (PONs) have been proposed as an ideal candidate to support such demanding environments. One of the major challenges of such networks, which significantly affects the provided QoS, is the effective resource allocation in both the time and the wavelength domains. The existing resource allocation algorithms for PONs were designed without considering the stringent requirements of TI applications thus making PON support for TI inefficient. In this paper, a new double per priority queue dynamic wavelength and bandwidth allocation algorithm is presented. This algorithm allocates the network resources efficiently and fairly using several techniques, in order to meet the QoS demands of Tactile and other types of healthcare applications. Extensive simulation results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to provide the required QoS for medical applications under various simulation scenarios whereas other well-known schemes are shown to lack such support.

Keywords

• Healthcare applications
• passive optical networks
• quality of service
• tactile Internet