Fair-Queued Ethernet for Medical Applications

Ethernet is becoming an accepted standard for more and more medical applications. It is a best-effort network standard without any transmission guarantees. However, in medical applications real-time transmission guarantees are getting more and more important.In this paper we discuss typical performance bottlenecks in medical networks and present an easy to implement solution to this problem. A fair-queued Ethernet switch with max-min fair scheduling is used to achieve transmission guarantees even in the presence of ill-behaved sources. This approach only replaces the switch hardware and thus works with unmodified hard- and software in end nodes.