Smart context-aware QoS-based admission control for biomedical wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are being used as the enabling technology that helps to support the development of new applications and services targeting the domain of healthcare, in particular, regarding data collection for continuous health monitoring of patients or to help physicians in their diagnosis and further treatment assessment. Therefore, due to the critical nature of both medical data and medical applications, such networks have to satisfy demanding quality of service requirements. Despite the efforts made in the last few years to develop quality of service mechanisms targeting wireless sensor networks and its wide range of applications, the network deployment scenario can severely restrict the network's ability to provide the required performance. Furthermore, the impact of such environments on the network performance is hard to predict and manage due to its random nature. In this way, network planning and management, in complex environments like general or step-down hospital units, is a problem still looking for a solution. In such context, this paper presents a smart context-aware quality of service based admission control method to help engineers, network administrators, and healthcare professionals managing and supervising the admission of new patients to biomedical wireless sensor networks. The proposed method was tested in a small sized hospital. In view of the results achieved during the experiments, the proposed admission control method demonstrated its ability, not only to control the admission of new patients to the biomedical wireless sensor network, but also to find the best location to admit the new patients within the network. By placing the new sensor nodes on the most favourable locations, this method is able to select the network topology in view of mitigating the quality of service provided by the network.Work supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, FCT, PhD Grant SFRH/BD/61278/2009. Miranda was supported by Portuguese funds through the CIDMA - Center for Research and Development in Mathematics and Applications, and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Review on Provisioning Quality of Service of Wireless Telemedicine for E-Health Services

In general, on-line medical consultation reduces time required for medical consultation induces improvement in the quality and efficiency of healthcare services. All major types of current e-health applications such as ECG, X-ray, video, diagnosis images and other common applications have been included in the scope of the study. In addition, the provision of Quality of Service (QoS) for the application of specific healthcare services in e-health, the scheme of priority for e-health services and the support of QoS in wireless networks and techniques or methods for IEEE 802.11 to guarantee the provision of QoS has also been assessed. In e-health, medical services in remote locations such as rural healthcare centers, ambulances, ships as well as home healthcare services can be supported through the applications of e-health services such as medical databases, electronic health records and the routing of text, audio, video and images. Given this, an adaptive resource allocation for a wireless network with multiple service types and multiple priorities have been proposed. For the provision of an acceptable QoS level to users of e-health services, prioritization is an important criterion in a multi-traffic network. The requirement for QoS provisioning in wireless broadband medical networks have paved the pathway for bandwidth requirements and the real-time or live transmission of medical applications. From the study, good performance of the proposed scheme has been validated by the results obtained. The proposed wireless network is capable of handling medical applications for both normal and life-threatening conditions as characterized by the level of emergencies. In addition, the bandwidth allocation and admission control algorithm for IEEE 802.16- based design specifically for wireless telemedicine/e-health services have also been presented in the study. It has been concluded that under busy traffic conditions, the proposed architecture can used as a feasible and reliable infrastructure network for telemedicine

Provisioning Quality of Service of Wireless Telemedicine for E-Health Services: A Review

In general, on-line medical consultation reduces time required for medical consultation and induces improvement in the quality and efficiency of healthcare services. The scope of study includes several key features of present day e-health applications such as X-ray, ECG, video, diagnosis images and other common applications. Moreover, the provision of Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of specific medical care services in e-health, the priority set for e-health services and the support of QoS in wireless networks and techniques or methods aimed at IEEE 802.11 to secure the provision of QoS has been assessed as well. In e-health, medical services in remote places which include rustic healthcare centres, ships, ambulances and home healthcare services can be supported through the applications of e-health services such as medical databases, electronic health data and the transferring of text, video, sound and images. Given this, a proposal has been made for a multiple service wireless networking with multiple sets of priorities. In relation to the terms of an acceptable QoS level by the customers of e-health services, prioritization is an important criterion in a multi-traffic network. The requirement for QoS in medical networking of wireless broadband has paved the way for bandwidth prerequisites and the live transmission or real-time medical applications. The proposed wireless network is capable of handling medical applications for both normal and life-threatening conditions as characterized by the level of emergencies. In addition, the allocation of bandwidth and the system that controls admittance designed based on IEEE 802.16 especially for e-health services or wireless telemedicine will be discussed in this study. It has been concluded that under busy traffic conditions, the proposed architecture can used as a feasible and reliable infrastructure network for telemedicine

Ubiquitous Computing for Remote Cardiac Patient Monitoring: A Survey

New wireless technologies, such as wireless LAN and sensor networks, for telecardiology purposes give new possibilities for monitoring vital parameters with wearable biomedical sensors, and give patients the freedom to be mobile and still be under continuous monitoring and thereby better quality of patient care. This paper will detail the architecture and quality-of-service (QoS) characteristics in integrated wireless telecardiology platforms. It will also discuss the current promising hardware/software platforms for wireless cardiac monitoring. The design methodology and challenges are provided for realistic implementation

Vesta: A Secure and Autonomic System for Pervasive Healthcare

Accepted versio

Towards Confident Body Sensor Networking

With the recent technology advances of wireless communication and lightweight low-power sensors, Body Sensor Network (BSN) is made possible. More and more researchers are interested in developing numerous novel BSN applications, such as remote health/fitness monitoring, military and sport training, interactive gaming, personal information sharing, and secure authentication. Despite the unstable wireless communication, various confidence requirements are placed on the BSN networking service. This thesis aims to provide Quality of Service (QoS) solutions for BSN communication, in order to achieve the required confidence goals.;We develop communication quality solutions to satisfy confidence requirements from both the communication and application levels, in single and multiple BSNs. First, we build communication QoS, targeting at providing service quality guarantees in terms of throughput and time delay on the communication level. More specifically, considering the heterogeneous BSN platform in a real deployment, we develop a radio-agnostic solution for wireless resource scheduling in the BSN. Second, we provide a QoS solution for both inter- and intra-BSN communications when more than one BSNs are involved. Third, we define application fidelity for two neurometric applications as examples, and bridge a connection between the communication QoS and application QoS

Application priority framework for fixed mobile converged communication networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The current prospects in wired and wireless access networks, it is becoming increasingly important to address potential convergence in order to offer integrated broadband services. These systems will need to offer higher data transmission capacities and long battery life, which is the catalyst for an everincreasing variety of air interface technologies targeting local area to wide area connectivity. Current integrated industrial networks do not offer application aware context delivery and enhanced services for optimised networks. Application aware services provide value-added functionality to business applications by capturing, integrating, and consolidating intelligence about users and their endpoint devices from various points in the network. This thesis mainly intends to resolve the issues related to ubiquitous application aware service, fair allocation of radio access, reduced energy consumption and improved capacity. A technique that measures and evaluates the data rate demand to reduce application response time and queuing delay for multi radio interfaces is proposed. The technique overcomes the challenges of network integration, requiring no user intervention, saving battery life and selecting the radio access connection for the application requested by the end user. This study is split in two parts. The first contribution identifies some constraints of the services towards the application layer in terms of e.g. data rate and signal strength. The objectives are achieved by application controlled handover (ACH) mechanism in order to maintain acceptable data rate for real-time application services. It also looks into the impact of the radio link on the application and identifies elements and parameters like wireless link quality and handover that will influence the application type. It also identifies some enhanced traditional mechanisms such as distance controlled multihop and mesh topology required in order to support energy efficient multimedia applications. The second contribution unfolds an intelligent application priority assignment mechanism (IAPAM) for medical applications using wireless sensor networks. IAPAM proposes and evaluates a technique based on prioritising multiple virtual queues for the critical nature of medical data to improve instant transmission. Various mobility patterns (directed, controlled and random waypoint) has been investigated and compared by simulating IAPAM enabled mobile BWSN. The following topics have been studied, modelled, simulated and discussed in this thesis: 1. Application Controlled Handover (ACH) for multi radios over fibre 2. Power Controlled Scheme for mesh multi radios over fibre using ACH 3. IAPAM for Biomedical Wireless Sensor Networks (BWSN) and impact of mobility over IAPAM enabled BWSN. Extensive simulation studies are performed to analyze and to evaluate the proposed techniques. Simulation results demonstrate significant improvements in multi radios over fibre performance in terms of application response delay and power consumption by upto 75% and 15 % respectively, reduction in traffic loss by upto 53% and reduction in delay for real time application by more than 25% in some cases