Future challenges and recommendations

Rapid advances in information technology and telecommunications, and in particular mobile and wireless communications, converge towards the emergence of a new type of “infostructure” that has the potential of supporting a large spectrum of advanced services for healthcare and health. Currently the ICT community produces a great effort to drill down from the vision and the promises of wireless and mobile technologies and provide practical application solutions. Research and development include data gathering and omni-directional transfer of vital information, integration of human machine interface technology into handheld devices and personal applications, security and interoperability of date and integration with hospital legacy systems and electronic patient record. The ongoing evolution of wireless technology and mobile device capabilities is changing the way healthcare providers interact with information technologies. The growth and acceptance of mobile information technology at the point of care, coupled with the promise and convenience of data on demand, creates opportunities for enhanced patient care and safety. The developments presented in this section demonstrate clearly the innovation aspects and trends towards user oriented applications

A CTC and D2D based Network Architecture for Reliable and Energy-Efficient Public Safety Communication

Public Safety Communication (PSC) is responsible to provide reliable communications between the first responders and the victims in public safety scenarios. Some state-of-the-art wireless communication technologies, such as Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) and Device-to-Device (D2D) communication, are providing more possibilities of the connectivity amongst different communication devices. For instance, CTC enables communications between heterogeneous wireless devices (e.g. Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth) operating in the same ISM band, and D2D communication allows direct communication between wireless devices without traversing a base station. These features make them be promising to be applied for reliable PSC network establishments. They can replace those traditional wireless communication technologies which are not specially designed for PSC networks. In this research work, we propose a novel PSC network architecture based on CTC and D2D communication technologies. To be specific, we propose a novel device clustering scheme to expand the coverage of the PSC network. Cluster heads and cluster gateways in the scheme are chosen from a group of user equipment (UE) based on particular metrics, e.g., residual battery power, received signal strength indicator, etc. Moreover, we propose a scheduling scheme for managing the UE in our PSC network to improve energy efficiency. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed PSC network architecture can provide reliable public safety communications with high energy efficiency.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/stander_posters/2532/thumbnail.jp

Multiple interface scheduling system for heterogeneous wireless vehicular networks: Description and evaluation

Reliable wireless communications between vehicles (V2V) and between vehicles and infrastructure (V2I) will play a key role in future transport networks. Where there is overlapping coverage of multiple Radio Access Technologies, with no cooperation between them, a vehicle can use the different technologies simultaneously. This paper proposes an uplink Multi Interface Scheduling System (MISS) located at an intermediate shim layer on the user side, to achieve efficient bandwidth aggregation, or lower end-to-end packet delay. MISS aims to find all the available networks that can meet multiple criteria based on user preference and required performance. Simulation results show that safety critical traffic can be prioritized where the resources are insufficient for all the services. Video delivery quality is also improved by prioritizing the most important frames. This algorithm is ideally suited to vehicular networks, where delivery of safety traffic and/or video is an essential requirement

Considering the User in the Wireless World

The near future promises significant advances in communication capabilities, but one of the keys to success is the capability understanding of the people with regards to its value and usage. In considering the role of the user in the wireless world of the future, the Human Perspective Working Group (WG1) of the Wireless World Research Forum has gathered input and developed positions in four important areas: methods, processes, and best practices for user-centered research and design; reference frameworks for modeling user needs within the context of wireless systems; user scenario creation and analysis; and user interaction technologies. This article provides an overview of WG1's work in these areas that are critical to ensuring that the future wireless world meets and exceeds the expectations of people in the coming decades

Soft-Defined Heterogeneous Vehicular Network: Architecture and Challenges

Heterogeneous Vehicular NETworks (HetVNETs) can meet various quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for intelligent transport system (ITS) services by integrating different access networks coherently. However, the current network architecture for HetVNET cannot efficiently deal with the increasing demands of rapidly changing network landscape. Thanks to the centralization and flexibility of the cloud radio access network (Cloud-RAN), soft-defined networking (SDN) can conveniently be applied to support the dynamic nature of future HetVNET functions and various applications while reducing the operating costs. In this paper, we first propose the multi-layer Cloud RAN architecture for implementing the new network, where the multi-domain resources can be exploited as needed for vehicle users. Then, the high-level design of soft-defined HetVNET is presented in detail. Finally, we briefly discuss key challenges and solutions for this new network, corroborating its feasibility in the emerging fifth-generation (5G) era