Impact of Mobile and Wireless Technology on Healthcare Delivery services

Modern healthcare delivery services embrace the use of leading edge technologies and new scientific discoveries to enable better cures for diseases and better means to enable early detection of most life-threatening diseases. The healthcare industry is finding itself in a state of turbulence and flux. The major innovations lie with the use of information technologies and particularly, the adoption of mobile and wireless applications in healthcare delivery [1]. Wireless devices are becoming increasingly popular across the healthcare field, enabling caregivers to review patient records and test results, enter diagnosis information during patient visits and consult drug formularies, all without the need for a wired network connection [2]. A pioneering medical-grade, wireless infrastructure supports complete mobility throughout the full continuum of healthcare delivery. It facilitates the accurate collection and the immediate dissemination of patient information to physicians and other healthcare care professionals at the time of clinical decision-making, thereby ensuring timely, safe, and effective patient care. This paper investigates the wireless technologies that can be used for medical applications, and the effectiveness of such wireless solutions in a healthcare environment. It discusses challenges encountered; and concludes by providing recommendations on policies and standards for the use of such technologies within hospitals

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

NOMA Assisted Wireless Caching: Strategies and Performance Analysis

Conventional wireless caching assumes that content can be pushed to local caching infrastructure during off-peak hours in an error-free manner; however, this assumption is not applicable if local caches need to be frequently updated via wireless transmission. This paper investigates a new approach to wireless caching for the case when cache content has to be updated during on-peak hours. Two non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted caching strategies are developed, namely the push-then-deliver strategy and the push-and-deliver strategy. In the push-then-deliver strategy, the NOMA principle is applied to push more content files to the content servers during a short time interval reserved for content pushing in on-peak hours and to provide more connectivity for content delivery, compared to the conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) strategy. The push-and-deliver strategy is motivated by the fact that some users' requests cannot be accommodated locally and the base station has to serve them directly. These events during the content delivery phase are exploited as opportunities for content pushing, which further facilitates the frequent update of the files cached at the content servers. It is also shown that this strategy can be straightforwardly extended to device-to-device caching, and various analytical results are developed to illustrate the superiority of the proposed caching strategies compared to OMA based schemes

Backhaul-Aware Caching Placement for Wireless Networks

As the capacity demand of mobile applications keeps increasing, the backhaul network is becoming a bottleneck to support high quality of experience (QoE) in next-generation wireless networks. Content caching at base stations (BSs) is a promising approach to alleviate the backhaul burden and reduce user-perceived latency. In this paper, we consider a wireless caching network where all the BSs are connected to a central controller via backhaul links. In such a network, users can obtain the required data from candidate BSs if the data are pre-cached. Otherwise, the user data need to be first retrieved from the central controller to local BSs, which introduces extra delay over the backhaul. In order to reduce the download delay, the caching placement strategy needs to be optimized. We formulate such a design problem as the minimization of the average download delay over user requests, subject to the caching capacity constraint of each BS. Different from existing works, our model takes BS cooperation in the radio access into consideration and is fully aware of the propagation delay on the backhaul links. The design problem is a mixed integer programming problem and is highly complicated, and thus we relax the problem and propose a low-complexity algorithm. Simulation results will show that the proposed algorithm can effectively determine the near-optimal caching placement and provide significant performance gains over conventional caching placement strategies.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted to IEEE Globecom, San Diego, CA, Dec. 201