Analysis of mobility management solutions for mobile medical multimedia transmission in HetNet environments

Abstract

By 2020 the number of mobile-connected devices will reach 11.6 billion, including smartphones, tablets, wearable devices, sensors among others, which will exceed the world’s projected population at that time. Wirelessly connected devices by their nature imply that users are able to be part of a network, giving space for new-generation, novel fields such as mobile healthcare applications. Such pervasive and ubiquitous services rely advanced network architectures designed to provide reliable communication and high quality data transmission in any mobility scenario. Increasingly growing heterogeneous network (HetNet) technologies hold the potential to address longstanding challenges in healthcare domain, to ensure advanced communication solutions for critical mHealth services and to support patient-centric, “care anywhere” concept. The focus of this article is to present and evaluate the effects of an optimized HetNet-aware mobility management proposal on mHealth applications with intense multimedia transmission.