A priority aware cognitive radio based hospital system architecture, priority management and communication protocols

Recently, wireless communication in medical data and patient information transmission has received tremendous attention to the researchers since effective, timely, accurate, complete and unambiguous communication reduces errors and results in improved patient safety. However, wireless communication technology in a healthcare environment poses some major challenges. For example, medical band scarcity for future wireless healthcare system, bandwidth restriction, spectrum utilization and electromagnetic interference (EMI) are major concerned. In addition, different types of e-health applications have different priorities. Therefore, communication protocols and network maintenance policies for wireless healthcare need to be priority mechanism agile. Compared to traditional wireless network, cognitive radio network (CRN) can be more flexible and solve these problems. In this paper, a novel CRN based hospital system architecture namely CogMed, is proposed for e-health applications where priority mechanism aware heterogeneous architecture, system design and communication policies are included. The article first analyzes the shortcomings of recent wireless healthcare facility by critically analyzing the contemporary literatures on CRN centric healthcare facility. It then proposes a fully opportunistic network based hospital system architecture where dynamic spectrum access (DSA) capable medical, non-medical and sensor devices are categorized based on a dynamic priority management mechanism. The paper also presents some communication protocols.