Addressing the challenges of e-healthcare in future mobile networks

Abstract

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is expected to play a major role within the coming years towards the development of e-healthcare applications. The design of cellular networks, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE), is optimized to serve the data traffic of human-based communication with broadband requirements. E-healthcare traffic has different characteristics such as small packet sizes, narrowband requirements and huge number of devices. The focus of this work is to investigate the impact of e-healthcare traffic on LTE cellular networks. We develop a possible future scenario of electrocardiography (ECG) devices performing remote monitoring of patients with mobility support in our LTE simulation model. Regular LTE traffic is also deployed in the network and the influence of the varying ECG traffic is examined. The simulation results indicate that the e-healthcare related data traffic has a drastic influence on regular LTE traffic. © 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.