SMART for mobile health: A study of scheduling algorithms in full-IP mobile networks

As a joint initiative of WHO and ITU, mHealth is becoming a feasible tool to offer data-intensive healthcare services online. In general, each kind of mHealth application has user-specific service-quality requirements that could be satisfied in the cost of bandwidth overconsumption. In any mobile network, bandwidth overconsumption is selfishly competing with limited radio resources. This phenomenon is further magnified by the “best-effort” service pattern inherited from IP networking, and the influence from interference, fading, and other mobility effects on unreliable radio channels. To enrich mHealth applications, we propose a Service-Mapping Adaptive Radio Transmission (SMART) scheduling algorithm, in which system parameters (QCI, CQI, MCS in AMC, etc.) are employed to enable “better than best effort” packet-switching services in full-IP mobile networks (e.g. LTE/LTE-Advanced). In this proposal, the designed scheduling metric is a self-adaptive mechanism that can combine mobile service-quality inspection and transmission pattern recognition dynamically. System-level simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposal can obtain approximately 31.25 percent gain on average, in contrast to existing solutions. Additionally, the runtime complexity of this solution is lowered to O(K log K), where K is the number of mHealth users within a cell.