A Proportional Fair Quality of Service Allocation Scheme for Telemedicine Applications

The wide diffusion of health care monitoring systems allows continuous patient remotely monitoring and diagnostics by doctors. The problem of congestion, namely due to the uncontrolled increase of traffic with respect to the network capacity, is one of the most phenomena affecting the reliability of transmission of information in any network. So it is a focal issue, especially in POC (Point Of Care) Telemedicine systems transmitting vital signs, to design an appropriate control strategy addressing reliability and timely delivery without failure. The aim of the paper is to propose a congestion problem by placing a proportional fair allocation control strategy at each terminal node for regulating the rate of flow of data at the POC nodes proportionally to their priority. The priority can be related to both the bandwidth requirement for reliable communication of a vital signal and to the level of emergency in a specific acute care, clinical disease and outbreak/disaster situations. We use a realistic simulation environment for showing the feasibility of our approach in significantly reducing congestion and improve the Telemedicine efficiency operation