Request-Based Polling Access: Investigation of Novel Wireless LAN MAC Scheme for Low-Latency E-Health Applications

• Published in: IEEE communications letters Vol. 23; no. 5; pp. 896 - 899
• Main Authors: Lv, Yunxin, Dias, Maluge Pubuduni Imali, Ruan, Lihua, Wong, Elaine, Feng, Ye, Jiang, Ning, Qiu, Kun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.05.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Access control; Coordination; delay-sensitive healthcare traffic; Delays; e-health; Health care; Hospitals; Hubs; Internet of Things; Local area networks; Low delay; Media Access Protocol; medium access control; Queues; Traffic delay; Uplink; Wireless LAN; wireless local area network; Wireless networks
• ISSN: 1089-7798; 1558-2558
• DOI: 10.1109/LCOMM.2019.2903801

For hospital e-health systems, a novel medium access control (MAC) scheme that achieves delay-sensitive healthcare traffic (DSHT) delivery in the uplink direction of wireless local area networks (WLANs) is proposed and investigated. By introducing a slotted request uploading period and informing hubs to upload their transmission requests orderly during the period, overhead cost associated with frequent transmitter/receiver transitions can be reduced and polling empty hubs can be eliminated. Consequently, the proposed scheme results in in-time polling of hubs, thereby optimizing packet queuing delay. Moreover, due to centralized coordination, the proposed scheme avoids contention and back-off. Such an MAC scheme is critical to the Internet of Things (IoT)-based delay-sensitive healthcare applications (DSHAs), such as unmanned patient tending and tele-diagnose/surgery in future e-health systems. Our simulation results show that under a delay constraint of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">200~\mu \text{s} </tex-math></inline-formula>, the proposed scheme outperforms both the conventional point coordination function (PCF) and distributed coordination function (DCF) schemes in terms of DSHT throughput and has a good DSHT delivery stability performance.