INTELLIGENT PROTOCOL ADAPTATION IN A MEDICAL E-COLLABORATION ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

Distributed multimedia e-health applications have a set of specific requirements which must be taken into account if effective use is to be made of the limited resources provided by public telecommunication networks. Moreover, there is an architectural gap between the provision of network-level Quality of Service (QoS) and user requirements of e-health applications. In this paper, we address the problem of bridging this gap from a multi-criteria decision-making perspective in the context of a remote collaborative environment for back pain treatment. We propose adaptable data transport mechanisms, capable of responding to evolving networking, application and user requirements. To this end we present a framework which allows for not only construction of tailored multimedia communication protocols, but also for the inclusion of user requirements in such protocols. This is achieved by equipping our protocol adaptation mechanism with multi-criteria decision making based techniques that can be used to allocate resources according to their ratio-scale priorities in response to detection of system degradation or evolving user preferences. The applicability of our approach is illustrated in three usage scenarios.