Minimizing interference in wireless mesh networks based telemedicine system

Abstract

Problem statement: It has been always a challenging task for the researchers to incorporate information technology advancements in the medical profession. In order to guarantee a reliable network infrastructure that supports the employment of wireless technology and mobile devices, a hybrid infrastructure that integrates wireless networks with the traditional wired Local Area Networks (LANs) is needed. The wired network will provide the stability to the network, improve the overall performance of the hybrid network and provide an alternative to the mobile routes, hence increasing the degree of redundancy and reliability. In recent years, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) have become more popular than ever. WMN has advantage of robust fault tolerance. Even if some of the mesh nodes are incapable, there exist many other alternative nodes to serve relay. In addition, multihop of WMN can not only spread coverage but also save both cabling cost and human resource. Health care can drastically benefit by incorporating technological advancements, particularly wireless mesh technology. In this study we have presented a telemedicine system for rural and urban scenario based on WMN so that the medical community gets benefited by state of art broadband connectivity. Also in this study we have addressed a critical issue of performance degradation in WMN due to interference and varying load. Approach: For this we have proposed a routing protocol AODV LBIARM. We have incorporated our routing metric Load Balancing Interference Aware Routing Metric (LBIARM) in AODV protocol to minimize the interference and cater for varying traffic load in multi hop WMN based telemedicine system, thereby maximizing network throughput. Results and Conclusion: This protocol is evaluated by simulating in Opnet Modeler 16.1 PL1. We have found that our proposed protocol performs better than AODV WCETT and AODV HOP-COUNT.