Telemedicine System Using Voice Video And Data Encapsulation And De-encapsulation For Communicating Medical Information Between Central Monitoring Stations And Remote Patient Monitoring Stations

The present invention provides a packet-based telemedicine system for communicating video, voice and medical data between a central monitoring station and a patient monitoring station which is remotely-located with respect to the central monitoring station. The patient monitoring station obtains digital video, voice and medical measurement data from a patient and encapsulates the data in packets and sends the packets over a network to the central monitoring station. Since the information is encapsulated in packets, the information can be sent over multiple types or combinations of network architectures, including a Community access Television (CATV) network, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), the Internet, a local area network (LAN), a wide are network (WAN), over a wireless communications network, or over an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network. Thus, a separate transmission protocol is not required for each different type of transmission media. Rather, a single transport/network layer protocol is used for encapsulating the information in packets at the sending end and for de-encapsulating the information at the receiving end. Furthermore, by sending the information in packets, the video, voice and measurement data can be integrated and sent over a single network.Georgia Tech Research Corporatio

Comparing the Efficiency of IP and ATM Telephony

Circuit switching, suited to providing real-time services due to the low and fixed switching delay, is not cost effective for building integrated services networks bursty data traffic because it is based on static allocation of resources which is not efficient with bursty data traffic. Moreover, since current circuit switching technologies handle flows at rates which are integer multiples of 64 kb/s, low bit rate voice encoding cannot be taken advantage of without aggregating multiple phone calls on a single channel. This work explores the real-time efficiency of IP telephony, i.e. the volume of voice traffic with deterministically guaranteed quality related to the amount of network resources used. IP and ATM are taken into consideration as packet switching technology for carrying compressed voice and it is compared to circuit switching carrying PCM (64 Kb/s) encoded voice. ADPCM32 is the voice encoding scheme used throughout most of the paper. The impact of several network parameters, among which the number of hops traversed by a call, on the real-time efficiency is studie

Integrated voice/data services on multihop radio networks

Integrated voice/data is the first step toward Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDN). Various techniques have been proposed and analyzed for multiplexing voice and data over a large bandwidth channel. Network efficiency is what we are most concerned about. In this paper, we address the problem of determining optimal access policies for a tandem ISDN network by using Dynamic Programming. Computer simulation shows that optimal policy minimizes the data delay

Hybrid routing technique for a fault-tolerant, integrated information network

The evolutionary growth of the space station and the diverse activities onboard are expected to require a hierarchy of integrated, local area networks capable of supporting data, voice, and video communications. In addition, fault-tolerant network operation is necessary to protect communications between critical systems attached to the net and to relieve the valuable human resources onboard the space station of time-critical data system repair tasks. A key issue for the design of the fault-tolerant, integrated network is the development of a robust routing algorithm which dynamically selects the optimum communication paths through the net. A routing technique is described that adapts to topological changes in the network to support fault-tolerant operation and system evolvability

Analog FM/FM versus digital color TV transmission aboard space station

Langley Research Center is developing an integrated fault tolerant network to support data, voice, and video communications aboard Space Station. The question of transmitting the video data via dedicated analog channels or converting it to the digital domain for consistancy with the test of the data is addressed. The recommendations in this paper are based on a comparison in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the type of video processing required aboard Space Station, the applicability to Space Station, and how they integrate into the network

IP and ATM - current evolution for integrated services

Current and future applications make use of different technologies as voice, data, and video. Consequently network technologies need to support them. For many years, the ATM based Broadband-ISDN has generally been regarded as the ultimate networking technology, which can integrate voice, data, and video services. With the recent tremendous growth of the Internet and the reluctant deployment of public ATM networks, the future development of ATM seems to be less clear than it used to be. In the past IP provided (and was though to provide) only best effort services, thus, despite its world wide diffution, was not considered as a network solution for multimedia application. Currently many of the IETF working groups work on areas related to integrated services, and IP is also proposing itself as networking technology for supporting voice, data, and video services. This paper give a technical overview on the competing integrated services network solutions, such as IP, ATM and the different available and emerging technologies on how to run IP over ATM, and tries to identify their potential and shortcomings

Survey of unified approaches to integrated-service networks

The increasing demand for communication services, coupled with recent technological advances in communication media and switching techniques, has resulted in a proliferation of new and expanded services. Currently, networks are needed which can transmit voice, data, and video services in an application-independent fashion. Unified approaches employ a single switching technique across the entire network bandwidth, thus, allowing services to be switched in an application-independent manner. This paper presents a taxonomy of integrated-service networks including a look at N-ISDN, while focusing on unified approaches to integrated-service networks.The two most promising unified approaches are burst and fast packet switching. Burst switching is a circuit switching-based approach which allocates channel bandwidth to a connection only during the transmission of "bursts" of information. Fast packet switching is a packet switching-based approach which can be characterized by very high transmission rates on network links and simple, hardwired protocols which match the rapid channel speed of the network. Both approaches are being proposed as possible implementations for integrated-service networks. We survey these two approaches, and also examine the key performance issues found in fast packet switching. We then present the results of a simulation study of a fast packet switching network

Remote voice training: A case study on space shuttle applications, appendix C

The Tile Automation System includes applications of automation and robotics technology to all aspects of the Shuttle tile processing and inspection system. An integrated set of rapid prototyping testbeds was developed which include speech recognition and synthesis, laser imaging systems, distributed Ada programming environments, distributed relational data base architectures, distributed computer network architectures, multi-media workbenches, and human factors considerations. Remote voice training in the Tile Automation System is discussed. The user is prompted over a headset by synthesized speech for the training sequences. The voice recognition units and the voice output units are remote from the user and are connected by Ethernet to the main computer system. A supervisory channel is used to monitor the training sequences. Discussions include the training approaches as well as the human factors problems and solutions for this system utilizing remote training techniques

Impacts of buffering voice calls in integrated voice and data services

In this study, we aim to analyse the relationship between various characteristics of a communication system with data and voice call requests. Queuing theory and Markov chain analysis are effectively used for this purpose. Such a study is useful for understanding how the proposed mathematical models behave which represents a system with integrated voice and data calls in homogenous wireless networks. We also propose to optimise the system characteristics in an attempt to provide better Quality of Service (QoS) for systems with integrated voice and data calls. The proposed models have two dimensions; one for voice calls and one for data calls. A channel is assigned for two input traffic call, namely, voice and data calls. The incoming voice and data calls are queued when the channel is busy. Since voice calls are delay-sensitive, priority is given to voice calls. Also, since there is only one channel, data calls are only serviced if there are no voice calls in the system. For such systems, it is important to analyse the impact of buffering the voice calls as well as data calls for various mean rates of call requests, and mean service times. The analytical models presented are generic which is applicable for various systems with similar characteristics. Numerical results are also provided. The results show that the proposed models can be used for optimisation of the performance of a given network

Design of an Integrated Services Packet Network

The Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) has been proposed as a wat of providing integrated voice and data communications services on a universal or near-universal basis. In this paper, I argue that the evolutionary approach inherent in current ISDN proposals in unlikely to provide an effective long tern solution and advocate a more revolutionary approach, based on the use of advanced packet switching technology. The bulk of this paper is devoted to a detailed description of an Integrated Services Packet Network (ISPN), which I offer as an alternative to current ISDN proposals