Adaptive tuning of IEEE 802.11e EDCA for medical-grade QoS

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an adaptive tuning algorithm for wireless medical applications to in order to meet medical-grade quality of service (QoS). The conventional IEEE 802.11e protocol is designed to satisfy a certain level of QoS, which is insufficient for medical-grade QoS. In the proposed algorithm, we adaptively tune the AIFS value of the IEEE 802.11e protocol for enhancing the overall network performance while providing the required medical-grade QoS. In our scenario, as representative applications, we consider medical alarms, ECG transmission, and TCP file transfer. We categorize these three applications according to their urgency. Then, we compare the performance of the proposed scheme with the conventional IEEE 802.11e protocol.