Scheduling for Efficient Telemedicine Traffic Transmission over Next Generation Cellular Networks

Abstract

Telemedicine traffic transmission has gained in importance during the past few years. Due to the fact that it carries critical information regarding the patients’ condition, the expedited and errorless transmission of multimedia telemedicine traffic is of fundamental importance. The prioritized or guaranteed transmission of telemedicine traffic, however, can lead to the violation of the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of regular traffic users and to the loss of guaranteed bandwidth in cases when it is left unused, due to the infrequent nature of telemedicine traffic. To resolve these problems, we propose a Multiple Access Control (MAC) protocol, for the integrated transmission of regular and telemedicine traffic transmission over next generation cellular networks and an adaptive bandwidth reservation scheme based on road map information and on user mobility and a fair scheduling scheme for telemedicine traffic transmission over cellular networks. The combination of the two schemes achieves high channel bandwidth utilization while offering full priority to telemedicine traffic over regular traffic. Three scheduling algorithms are evaluated, quantitatively and qualitatively, in terms of the QoS and the fairness they offer to different types of traffic.