Robust resource management for predictable services in wireless healthcare

Abstract

Wireless use is growing in the health-care industry. A good wireless solution has the potential to reduce deployment cost, facilitate ubiquitous information access, and improve patient care by eliminating wires, which are a source of infection and physical impediment to clinical care. However, the general perception of wireless communication as being unreliable, unpredictable and unsuitable for safe-critical applications hampers wider adoption of wireless solutions beyond best effort services. In this paper, we argue and demonstrate that wireless networks can in fact be made more reliable by robust resource management. In particular, predictable services can be achieved using joint power control, channel assignment and radio interface selection in multi-radio multi-channel(MR-MC) wireless networks in presence of unpredictable channel dynamics and interferences. Trace-driven simulation study using data collected from our wireless mesh testbed show that the proposed algorithm is indeed superior to existing schemes in reducing outage and packet loss probabilities.