Small cell-based ambulance scenario for medical video streaming: a 5G-health use case

It is believed that small cells will play a significant role in future networks (e.g., 5G) to meet the high user requirements in traffic volume, frequency efficiency, and energy and cost reduction. The small cell network is a new paradigm for the successful deployment of mobile healthcare (m-health) applications. It can enhance the medical Quality of Service (m-QoS) and medical Quality of Experience (m-QoE) for indoor, outdoor, and vehicular m-health end-users (e.g., patients and healthcare professionals). The three major contributions of the paper are: 1) the investigation of the impact of small cell heterogeneous networks for medical video streaming as an example of m-health application in the uplink direction. 2) introducing an important m-health use case (i.e., an ambulance scenario) along with its system model and technical requirements, and 3) the provision of a network performance analysis for medical video sequences affected by packet losses and different networks as a benchmark to enable researchers to test their medical video quality evaluation algorithms. The results of our proposed scenario show through simulation that the m-QoS key performance indicators (e.g., packet loss, throughput, and delay) in a mobile small cell-based ambulance scenario outperform the traditional macrocell network scenario. Hence, improving the network performance of the paramedic staff inside the ambulance can facilitate in robust delivery of emergency m-health services, such as real-time remote consultations and diagnosis.