Article ID: 2017EBP3157
The recent switch from analog to digital TV broadcasting around the world has led to the development of communications standards that consider the use of TVWhite Spaces (TVWS). One such standard is the IEEE 802.22 wireless regional area network (WRAN), which considers the use of TVWS to provide broadband wireless services over long transmission links, and therefore presents an opportunity to bring connectivity and data-based services from urban to rural areas. Services that could greatly benefit fromthe deployment ofwireless broadband data links between urban and rural areas are those related to telemedicine and m-health. To enable proper telemedicine service delivery from urban (e.g. an urban hospital) to rural locations (e.g. a rural clinic) it is of paramount importance to provide a certain quality of service (QoS) level. In this context, QoS provisioning for telemedicine applications over wireless networks presents a major challenge that must be addressed to fulfill the potential that rural wireless telemedicine has to offer. In this paper, a cross-layer approach combining medium access control (MAC) and application (APP) layers is proposed with the aim of reducing blocking probability in teleconsulting services operating over IEEE802.22/WRANs. At the APP layer, a teleconsulting traffic profile based on utilization rates is defined. On the other hand, at theMAC layer, an Adaptive Bandwidth Management (ABM) mechanism is used to perform a QoS-based classification of teleconsulting services and then dynamically allocate the bandwidth requirements. Three teleconsulting services with different bandwidth requirements are considered in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach: high-resolution teleconsulting, medium-resolution teleconsulting, and audio-only teleconsulting. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to reduce blocking probability by using different criteria for service modes within the admission control scheme.
