A novel hybrid network for hospital environment incorporating IEEE 802.16 and HomePlug AV standards

In this article, a novel hybrid network architecture is proposed by incorporating the state-of-the art IEEE 802.16 and HomePlug AV standard based systems. The proposed architecture allows to overcome limitations for using wireless devices and deliver nomadic broadband data communication services in hospital environment. Through the proposed Quality of Service (QoS) broker which jointly utilizes the QoS strategies in both the IEEE 802.16 and HomePlug AV systems, the end-to-end performance of simultaneous transmission of various types of medical data traffic such as patient´s video, diagnostic audio, ECG, and patient´s document files etc can be assured.