Providing QoS support for wireless remote healthcare system

Recent advances in wireless sensor technology facilitate the development of remote healthcare systems, which can significantly reduce the healthcare cost. Despite the initial promising results, there remain many obstacles to apply this technology to the practical medical care context. One of the critical issues is to assure the timely and robust delivery of the life-critical medical data in the resource-constrained wireless sensor networking environment. This paper addresses this issue and presents a quality of service (QoS) support mechanism for wireless remote healthcare system, which integrates XML-based QoS specification, patient admission policy, and differentiated scheduling and queue management. The proposed QoS support mechanism is implemented in CareNet, our wireless sensor system for remote healthcare. Extensive performance study is presented to validate and evaluate our solution.