An Approach to Control Transmission of Medical Data over Cellular Networks Using Location Information

Within the Fontane project medical data has to be transmitted using public cellular networks. The most frequently transmitted data has only weak timing requirements. But in particular cases we also transmit streaming data that typically has soft real-time requirements. Regardless of the real-time nature of transmission though, the data being transmitted has associated priorities. However, public cellular networks have varying transmission characteristics and do not consider any kind of data priority on application level. We suggest using network specific information and priority aware mechanisms on client and server side to improve the behavior of our application. In public cellular networks each cell has a unique identifier that may be used to locate the sender within the network. We use the location area identity - a part of the cell identity - and the priority of the medical data to control the data transmission of our application. In addition to catering for data priority during transmission, we avoid bur sty traffic, which reduces adverse effects on other traffic flows that coexist in the same network. In this paper we present our traffic control protocol and the algorithm which is used to calculate the minimum priority level for each location area. The minimum priority is the least priority that the user data must have in order to be sent. Furthermore, we show how this protocol will be integrated into our middleware.