ABSTRACT
Telehealth applications such as Video-over-IP and remote sensor monitoring are rapidly growing in utilisation and it has now expanded to the patient's homes. These Telehealth applications are, however highly delay sensitive and require high quality (and bandwidth priority) in order to provide satisfactory performances. However, at the patient's home area network (HAN) environment, typically there is no Internet traffic management system which highly affects the quality of these applications. As HAN expands its capacity by adding new devices in its network, the need for a network management system become urgent and necessary. In this study, we propose an infrastructure based method to improve Telehealth application quality by managing the quality and distribution of the Internet traffic among the connected devices in a HAN environment. We setup a HAN environment using existing devices readily available at home and tested the setting with typical Telehealth application needs that includes Video-over-IP, VoIP, data and other multimedia traffic. Our simulation results showed that our method is capable of providing better services. Our method indicated that it can provide ~11% lesser packet-loss under 12Mbps background traffic, while increasing 10% of the CPU load for Traffic management.
