Design of adaptive IEEE 802.11 WLAN in hospital environments

In this paper, we propose an adaptive tuning scheme of IEEE 802.11 WLAN for healthcare applications. Our proposed method can significantly improve medical-grade quality of service (QoS) and network performance at the same time. Though the conventional IEEE 802.11e protocol supports a certain level of QoS, it does not provide medical-grade QoS due to its relative priority among different traffic classes. Our proposed scheme adaptively tunes the arbitrary inter frame space number (AIFSN) of the IEEE 802.11e protocol for enhancing the overall network performance while providing the required medical-grade QoS. In our healthcare scenario, we consider the following three medical traffic categories: medical alarm, real-time electrocardiogram (ECG) transmission, and TCP connection. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the performance of low-priority TCP traffic while protecting high-priority medical alarms from lower priority traffic.