Fair and Efficient Scheduling for Telemedicine Traffic Transmission over Wireless Cellular Networks

Telemedicine traffic transmission over wireless cellular networks has gained in importance during the last few years. Due to the fact that this type of traffic carries critical information regarding the patients´ condition, it is vitally important that multimedia telemedicine traffic has highest transmission priority in comparison to all other types of traffic in the cellular network. However, the need for expedited and correct transmission of telemedicine traffic calls for a guaranteed bandwidth to telemedicine users. This creates a tradeoff between the satisfaction of the very strict quality of service requirements of telemedicine traffic and the loss of the guaranteed bandwidth in the numerous cases when it is left unused, due to the infrequent nature of telemedicine traffic. In this paper, we propose a fair scheduling mechanism for telemedicine traffic transmission over wireless cellular networks. The mechanism achieves high channel bandwidth utilization while offering full priority to telemedicine traffic.