Quality of service in wireless e-emergency: Main issues and a case-study

Abstract

Due to its critical nature, emergency healthcare (e-emergency) systems should be totally reliable, efficient and support real-time traffic. Therefore e-emergency networks must provide proper quality of service (QoS) levels. After assessing the relevance of QoS deployment in different e-health contexts, this paper presents a pragmatic case-study intended to be deployed in a hospital room containing patients with high risk abnormalities, whose vital signals are being monitored by personal wireless body sensor networks. After justifying the unsuitability of ZigBee standard in this e-emergency scenario, the use of Low-Power, Real-Time (LPRT) protocol for wireless sensor networks, is proposed as an adequate candidate for such task. For the present case-study, the protocol is able to fulfill quantitatively the required QoS levels. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.