Providing QoS for sensor enabled emergency applications

One of the most important issues in sensor enabled emergency applications is the QoS provisioning. Wireless LANs plays critical role in providing anywhere and anytime connectivity for many sensor enabled emergency applications. This paper addresses the issue of provisioning QoS over the wireless channel between the sensor enabled emergency application and the wireless access points (e.g., wireless hotspots in various locations). Unlike traditional QoS provisioning which supports voice and data applications, resulted by the extremely rare events which lack the predictability, it is not trivial to provide adequate QoS support for the emergency data traffic with strong erratic nature. In this paper, we first investigated several potential alternative schemes to support QoS in emergency applications. An express dual channel (EDC) based QoS provisioning approach is then proposed. The proposed mechanism is not only simple and efficient, but also results in the minimum delay for the erratic emergency data traffic. Simulation results show the proposed EDC based solution provides satisfactory QoS for emergency applications