IEEE 802.11 WLAN for medical-grade QoS

Abstract

In this paper, we study the problem of how to design a medical-grade wireless LAN for healthcare facilities. Unlike IEEE 802.11e MAC, which categorizes traffic primarily by delay constraint, we prioritize medical applications into access categories according to medical criticality. We design a fully-distributed contention control mechanism that can efficiently utilize wireless channel for improving medical-grade QoS. We further derive a sufficient condition for the convergence of the proposed algorithm. Our simulation result shows that our medical access categorization and the contention control mechanism significantly improve the performance of a medical network over the conventional IEEE 802.11e MAC.