The Routing of Healthcare Applications in MPLS Networks

The number of elderly in industrialized countries is increasing, and the home healthcare applications are widespread. The routing of healthcare traffic is important with no doubt. This study investigates the problem of unfairness when QoS routing does not consider the mix of traffic classes. Unfairness is mainly caused by routing different traffic flows of the same class through paths with extremely different traffic mixtures, involving various service classes. Next, a new routing scheme-Service-sensitive Routing (SSR), which takes the state of traffic mixture of the various service classes into account, is proposed. To determine the QoS route for a flow request, SSR not only considers the available bandwidth and delay of the candidate paths, but also considers the mix of traffic classes on the paths. Additionally, the hybrid granularity routing decision in SSR scheme is scalable and suitable for the Differentiated Services and MPLS networks. Extensive simulations show that SSR can effectively reduce the variance of the average of queuing delays, for example by approximately 20% to 35% for a moderate offered load, compared to the shortest path routing.