Preparing Wi-Fi 7 for Healthcare Internet-of-Things

The healthcare Internet of Things (H-IoT) is an interconnection of devices capable of sensing and transmitting information that conveys the status of an individual's health. The continuous monitoring of an individual's health for disease diagnosis and early detection is an important application of H-IoT. Ambient assisted living (AAL) entails monitoring a patient's health to ensure their well-being. However, ensuring a limit on transmission delays is an essential requirement of such monitoring systems. The uplink (UL) transmission during the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) in the wireless local area networks (WLANs) can incur a delay which may not be acceptable for delay-sensitive applications such as H-IoT due to their random nature. Therefore, we propose a UL OFDMA scheduler for the next Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) standard, the IEEE 802.11be, that is compliant with the latency requirements for healthcare applications. The scheduler allocates the channel resources for UL transmission taking into consideration the traffic class or access category. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheduler can achieve the required latency for H-IoT applications. Additionally, the performance in terms of fairness and throughput is also superior to state-of-the-art schedulers.