Integrating digital Health services : the role of the government and the challenge of cost allocation

eHealth, mHealth and eCare services are growing in numbers at a fast pace. This is mainly driven by technology and the societal challenges of an aging and more chronically burdened population while pressure on both human and financial resources increases. Though the adoption of these digital health services is challenging and experience difficulties. This work focusses on the main barriers that cause a 'gap' in the value network. Via case research following barriers are identified: 1) low willingness to pay, 2) unbalanced cost/benefit ratios of the actors or unfair cost allocation and 3) negative impacted business models. Furthermore the several roles of the government within the value network of digital health services are discussed and reflections and guidelines for digital health service developers are foreseen

A cross-layer heuristic algorithm for addressing shadowing problem in optical attocell networks

The performance of visible light communication (VLC)-based optical attocell networks degrades due to shadowing caused by opaque objects. In order to improve reliability, we propose a cross-layer algorithm to find the optimal routing and resource allocation schemes when shadowing occurs. Simulation results show that the optimal scheme found by the proposed algorithm significantly improves the performance of optical attocell networks with one randomly shadowed link

Analysis of resource sharing in transparent networks

Transparent optical networking promises a cost-efficient solution for future core and metro networks because of the efficacy of switching high-granularity trunk traffic without opto-electronic conversion. Network availability is an important performance parameter for network operators, who are incorporating protection and restoration mechanisms in the network to achieve competitive advantages. This paper focuses on the reduction in Capital Expenditures (CapEx) expected from implementing sharing of backup resources in path-protected transparent networks. We dimension a nationwide network topology for different protection mechanisms using transparent and opaque architectures. We investigate the CapEx reductions obtained through protection sharing on a population of 1000 randomly generated biconnected planar topologies with 14 nodes. We show that the gain for transparent networks is heavily dependent on the offered load, with almost no relative gain for low load (no required parallel line systems). We also show that for opaque networks the CapEx reduction through protection sharing is independent of the traffic load and shows only a small dependency on the number of links in the network. The node CapEx reduction for high load (relative to the number of channels in a line system) is comparable to the CapEx reduction in opaque OTN systems. This is rather surprising as in OTN systems the number of transceivers and linecards and the size of the OTN switching matrix all decrease, while in transparent networks only the degree of the ROADM (number and size of WSSs in the node) decreases while the number of transponders remains the same

Network service chaining with efficient network function mapping based on service decompositions

Network Service Chaining (NSC) is a service concept which promises increased flexibility and cost-efficiency for future carrier networks. The two recent developments, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), are opportunities for service providers to simplify the service chaining and provisioning process and reduce the cost (in CAPEX and OPEX) while introducing new services as well. One of the challenging tasks regarding NFV-based services is to efficiently map them to the components of a physical network based on the services specifications/constraints. In this paper, we propose an efficient cost-effective algorithm to map NSCs composed of Network Functions (NF) to the network infrastructure while taking possible decompositions of NFs into account. NF decomposition refers to converting an abstract NF to more refined NFs interconnected in form of a graph with the same external interfaces as the higher-level NF. The proposed algorithm tries to minimize the cost of the mapping based on the NSCs requirements and infrastructure capabilities by making a reasonable selection of the NFs decompositions. Our experimental evaluations show that the proposed scheme increases the acceptance ratio significantly while decreasing the mapping cost in the long run, compared to schemes in which NF decompositions are selected randomly

Hardware-accelerator aware VNF-chain recovery

Hardware-accelerators in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) environments have aided telecommunications companies (telcos) to reduce their expenditures by offloading compute-intensive VNFs to hardware-accelerators. To fully utilize the benefits of hardware-accelerators, VNF-chain recovery models need to be adapted. In this paper, we present an ILP model for optimizing prioritized recovery of VNF-chains in heterogeneous NFV environments following node failures. We also propose an accelerator-aware heuristic for solving prioritized VNF-chain recovery problems of large-size in a reasonable time. Evaluation results show that the performance of heuristic matches with that of ILP in regard to restoration of high and medium priority VNF-chains and a small penalty occurs only for low-priority VNF-chains