Efficient OFDMA-based Solutions for Latency-Critical Healthcare Applications

Abstract

The rapid evolution of wireless communication technologies has enabled the development of innovative solutions within the healthcare sector. Currently, wireless communications do not provide a delay guarantee. This paper discusses the use of Prioritized OFDMA-based latency-sensitive communication with TSN capabilities to meet the stringent requirements of medical applications, which include low latency and deterministic data delivery. The investigation begins with the implementation of a priority-based scheduling algorithm using queue-based mechanisms, and its performance is compared to that of non-priority scheduling. Subsequently, we deploy TDMA together with traffic shaping mechanisms like Time-Aware Shapers (TAS) for efficient allocation of resources along with deterministic scheduling. Our scheduling strategy also makes use of latest WiFi features, such as OFDMA along with prioritized scheduling.Prioritized OFDMA, combined with TSN capabilities, ensures predictable latency that is critical for healthcare applications such as real-time patient monitoring and robotic surgery. Comparative studies between non-preemptive and preemptive protocols, as well as basic non-priority scheduling, reveal significant improvements in latency performance. Our results illustrate the merits of the proposed mechanism by highlighting latency improvement across different protocols and scenarios. The OFDMA-based scheduling combined with TAS, demonstrates that deterministic access mechanisms hold significant potential for healthcare applications.