• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• 제13권2호
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• pp.149-159
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• 2011

In this paper, we study the problem of how to design a medical-grade wireless local area network (WLAN) for healthcare facilities. First, unlike the IEEE 802.11e MAC, which categorizes traffic primarily by their delay constraints, we prioritize medical applications according to their medical urgency. Second, we propose a mechanism that can guarantee absolute priority to each traffic category, which is critical for medical-grade quality of service (QoS), while the conventional 802.11e MAC only provides relative priority to each traffic category. Based on absolute priority, we focus on the performance of real-time patient monitoring applications, and derive the optimal contention window size that can significantly improve the throughput performance. Finally, for proper performance evaluation from a medical viewpoint, we introduce the weighted diagnostic distortion (WDD) as a medical QoS metric to effectively measure the medical diagnosability by extracting the main diagnostic features of medical signal. Our simulation result shows that the proposed mechanism, together with medical categorization using absolute priority, can significantly improve the medical-grade QoS performance over the conventional IEEE 802.11e MAC.

• 제어로봇시스템학회논문지
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• 제20권6호
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• pp.676-688
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• 2014

The IEEE 802.11e EDCA (Enhanced Distributed Channel Access) mechanism has been proposed to improve the QoS (Quality of Service) of various services in WLANs (Wireless Local Area Networks). By differentiating the channel access delay depending on ACs (Access Categories), this mechanism can provide the relative service differentiation among ACs. In this paper, we consider that WLAN is deployed in medical environments to transfer medical traffic and we reveal that the quality of the medical traffic (in particular, ECG signals) is significantly deteriorated even with the service differentiation by IEEE 802.11e EDCA. Also, we analyze the reason for performance degradation and show that IEEE 802.11e EDCA has difficulty in protecting the transmission opportunity of high-priority traffic against low-priority traffic. In order to assure medical-grade QoS, we firstly define the service priority of medical traffic based on their characteristics and requirements, and then we propose the enhanced channel access scheme, referred to as DIFF-CW. The proposed scheme differentiates CW (Contention Window) depending on the service priority and modifies the channel access procedure for low-priority traffic. The simulation results confirm that the DIFF-CW scheme not only assures the QoS of medical traffic but also improves the overall channel utilization.