Abstract
In the next few years, fundamental technological transitions are expected both for wireless communications, soon resulting in the 5G era, and for the kind of pervasiveness that will be achieved thanks to the Internet of Things. The implementation of such new communication paradigms is expected to significantly revolutionize people’s lives, industry, commerce, and many daily activities. Healthcare applications are considered to be one of the most impacted industries. Sadly, in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic currently afflicting our society, health remote monitoring has become a fundamental and urgent application. The overcrowding of hospitals and medical facilities due to COVID-19, has unavoidably created delays and key issues in providing adequate medical assistance. In several cases, asymptomatic or light symptomatic COVID-19 patients have to be continuously monitored to prevent emergencies, and such an activity does not necessarily require hospitalization. Considering this research direction, this paper investigates the potentiality of cloud-based cellular networks to support remote healthcare monitoring applications implemented in accordance with the IoT paradigm, combined with future cellular systems. The idea is to conveniently replace the physical interaction between patients and doctors with a reliable virtual one, so that hospital services can be reserved for emergencies. Specifically, we investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of remote healthcare monitoring by evaluating its impact on the network performance. Furthermore, we discuss the potentiality of medical data compression and how it can be exploited to reduce the traffic load.
Highlights
Over the last few years, we have witnessed how the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) has led the world into a new communications Era
We contribute under three perspectives: 1) by providing a discussion on how this remote healthcare can be framed in the 5G infrastructures; 2) by indicating the benefits of data compression in cloud-based services designed to collect and analyse IoT data measured at the patient’s side; 3) by assessing the behaviour in the current cellular setting, based on LTE
By assuming the final user/patient to be potentially provided with multiple devices, we consider the presence of an LTE medical gateway (LTE–MGW) responsible for patient data collection and transmission over the LTE network (Figure 2)
Summary
Over the last few years, we have witnessed how the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) has led the world into a new communications Era. We contribute under three perspectives: 1) by providing a discussion on how this remote healthcare can be framed in the 5G infrastructures; 2) by indicating the benefits of data compression in cloud-based services designed to collect and analyse IoT data measured at the patient’s side; 3) by assessing the behaviour in the current cellular setting, based on LTE As for this latter point, since 5G infrastructures have not been fully deployed yet, the existing 4G network framework (5G partially relies on 4G) can be fruitfully exploited to support healthcare activities. It is worth noting that some applications span over multiple, heterogeneous, usage scenarios, they cannot be identified in a single category of 5G services An example if this is smart healthcare, that, due to its current relevance, has emerged as one the most challenging fields where cellular technology can find a use (Ullah et al, 2019). Such a procedure is in general referred to as data synchronization and relies on particular data compression algorithms
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