Network-assisted Smart Access Point Selection for Pervasive Real-time mHealth Applications

Abstract

Abstract Due to the fast evolution of wireless access networks and high-performance mobile devices together with the spreading of wearable medical sensors, electronic healthcare (eHealth) services have recently started to receive more and more attention, especially in the mobile Health (mHealth) domain. The vast majority of mHealth services require strict medical level Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) provision. Emergency use-cases, remote patient monitoring, tele-consultation and guided surgical intervention require real-time communication and appropriate connection quality. The increasing significance of different overlapping wireless accesses makes possible to provide the required network resources for ubiquitous and pervasive mHealth applications. Aiming to support such use-cases in a heterogeneous network environment, we propose a network-assisted intelligent access point selection scheme for ubiquitous applications of Future Internet architectures focusing on real-time mobile telemedicine services. Our solution is able to discover nearby base stations that cover the current location of the mobile device efficiently and to trigger heterogeneous handovers based on the state and quality of the current access network. The solution is empirically evaluated in Wi-Fi networks used by real-life Android mobile devices and we observed that the scheme can improve the quality of mHealth applications and enhance traffic load balancing capabilities of wireless architectures.