To enable stable medical image and video transmission in mobile healthcare services: A Best-fit Carrier Dial-up (BCD) algorithm for GBR-oriented applications in LTE-A networks

Abstract

To provide healthcare services in mobile networks, GBR (Guaranteed Bit Rate)-oriented mechanism is expected to offer stable transmission for vital life and health information. Unfortunately, a kind of GBR-based applications is aggressive to exhaust limited bandwidths in a mobile network. To facilitate such a GBR-driven application, radio bandwidth scheduling should be agile and flexible. Motivated by this trend, we propose a Best-fit Carrier Dial-up (BCD) algorithm, which can dynamically schedule demanded bandwidth for GBR-oriented healthcare applications. In fact, this proposal is developed on the basis of Carrier Aggregation (CA), which is the typical new feature in LTE-A (Long Term Evolution-Advanced) networks. Compared with the CA technology, our proposal has two favorable properties: (1) the BCD algorithm uses the LTE-A own system information to select the best-fit carrier in order to avoid extra signaling overhead. Thus it is suitable for healthcare services which are time-sensitive; (2) the BCD algorithm can dial-up bandwidth on demand at a small-scale granularity. Most valuably, this proposal is backward compatible with CA standards seamlessly. In this study, medical image and consulting video are chosen for simulation experiments. Results verify that our proposal can finely tailor radio bandwidth allocation for the time-sensitive and stable healthcare services at a required GBR level.