Medical-Grade Channel Access and Admission Control in 802.11e EDCA for Healthcare Applications

In this paper, we deal with the problem of assuring medical-grade quality of service (QoS) for real-time medical applications in wireless healthcare systems based on IEEE 802.11e. Firstly, we show that the differentiated channel access of IEEE 802.11e cannot effectively assure medical-grade QoS because of priority inversion. To resolve this problem, we propose an efficient channel access algorithm. The proposed algorithm adjusts arbitrary inter-frame space (AIFS) in the IEEE 802.11e protocol depending on the QoS measurement of medical traffic, to provide differentiated near-absolute priority for medical traffic. In addition, based on rigorous capacity analysis, we propose an admission control scheme that can avoid performance degradation due to network overload. Via extensive simulations, we show that the proposed mechanism strictly assures the medical-grade QoS and improves the throughput of low-priority traffic by more than several times compared to the conventional IEEE 802.11e.