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Efficient Resource Allocation in Tactile-Capable Ethernet Passive Optical Healthcare LANs

Efficient Resource Allocation in Tactile-Capable Ethernet Passive Optical Healthcare LANs

Anastasios Valkanis1, Petros Nicopolitidis1, Georgios Papadimitriou1, Dimitrios Kallergis2, Christos Douligeris3, Panagiotis D. Bamidis4
11Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
2 Department of Informatics and Computer Engineering, University of West Attica, Greece
3 Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, Greece
4 School of Medicine, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
Corresponding author: Petros Nicopolitidis (petros@csd.auth.gr).

ABSTRACT

Communication networks for Healthcare environments support various application types and should be capable of providing them with the required Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of reliable data delivery, considerable data rate, and low latency. Introducing Tactile Internet (TI) health care applications is expected to upgrade the level of provided services to patients. The requirements of these applications are very stringent and a major requirement is that the existing network infrastructure must support them. Passive Optical Networks (PONs) have been proposed as an ideal candidate to support such demanding environments. One of the major challenges of such networks, which significantly affects the provided QoS, is the effective resource allocation in both time and wavelength domains. The existing resource allocation algorithms for PONs were designed without considering the stringent requirements of TI applications thus making PON support for TI inefficient. In this paper, a new double per priority queue dynamic wavelength and bandwidth allocation algorithm is presented, which efficiently and fairly allocates the network resources using several techniques, in order to meet the QoS demands of Tactile and other types of health care applications. Extensive simulation results are presented, that indicate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, which is shown to be able to provide the required QoS for medical applications under various simulation scenarios whereas other well-known schemes are shown to lack such support.

INDEX TERMS

Healthcare applications, Passive Optical Networks, Quality of Service, Tactile Internet