Enhanced Healthcare Traffic Routing through Classification

The number of elderly in industrialized countries is increasing, and the home healthcare applications are widespread. The routing of healthcare traffic is important with no doubt. This study investigates the problem of unfairness when Quality of Service routing does not consider the mix of traffic classes. Unfairness is mainly caused by routing different traffic flows of the same class through paths with extremely different traffic mixtures, involving various service classes. In an effect to improve efficiency and fairness we developed a scheme based on index that took traffic load balance into consideration. To determine the Quality of Service route for a flow request, this scheme (called Service-Sensitive Routing, SSR) not only considers the available bandwidth and delay of the candidate paths, but also considers the mix of traffic classes on the paths. Additionally, the hybrid granularity routing decision in SSR scheme is scalable and suitable for the Differentiated Services and MPLS networks. Extensive simulations show that SSR can effectively reduce the variance of the average of queuing delays, for example by approximately 20% to 35% for a moderate offered load, compared to the shortest path routing.