Title: SDN-based fair packet scheduling for prioritising healthcare traffic in mobile edge computing: a comparative analysis with PQ and FCFS

Authors: Shaiza Farooq; Muhammad Siraj Rathore

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Capital University of Science and Technology Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan ' Department of Computer Science, Capital University of Science and Technology Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan

Abstract: Remote healthcare infrastructures are generally equipped with Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) to offer healthcare services closer to patients' homes. The packet scheduling methods in these infrastructures prioritise emergency traffic, and the normal traffic queue is not processed until the priority queue is empty. The approach may lead to starvation of normal traffic. We propose SDN-based fair packet scheduler which guarantees service to each traffic type according to its proportional weight. We offer the highest priority to the emergency traffic but at the same time prevent other flows from possible starvation. We compare the performance of proposed fair scheduler with the traditional First Come First Serve (FCFS) and Priority Queuing (PQ) scheduling. Our results demonstrate that only fair scheduler could achieve the targeted throughput for normal traffic. In addition, packet loss ratio is reduced by 47% and the packet latency by 26% compared to PQ.

Keywords: SDN; software defined networking; WBAN; wireless body area networks; MEC; mobile edge computing; priority queue; FPS; fair packet scheduler.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIPT.2024.146221

International Journal of Internet Protocol Technology, 2024 Vol.17 No.3, pp.155 - 166

Received: 18 Sep 2024
Accepted: 18 Dec 2024
Published online: 13 May 2025 *

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