Wireless LAN with medical-grade QoS for e-healthcare

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.