Analysis and enhancement of WiMAX scheduling for telemedicine support

WiMAX is a radio technology for transmitting data at high speed. The challenge for these networks is to ensure the Quality of Service (QoS) for different types of applications having different characteristics and requirements. Among these applications we note the telemedicine; where communication and information technology is used to help improving human life especially in regard to health. Medical information has an inherent characteristic that differs it from other type of information, which is the emergency level. WiMAX technology is considered as a good candidate for telemedicine services. It offers different classes of services and proposes scheduling the radio resources between users according to their application priority. But it leaves the manufacturers and service providers to develop scheduling algorithms based on the scope and depending on the services offered to their customers. In this context, we are interested in evaluating and improving the performance of WiMAX toward the support of telemedicine by proposing a new scheduling scheme which takes into consideration the emergency of the traffic and the QoS requirements in terms of delay and throughput. The evaluation of the existing scheduling algorithms and that of the new proposed one is done via simulations.