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1.1 Goals and Motivation
The purpose of this study is to assess the capacity of
public wireless networks, more specifically local
high speed packet access (HSPA) networks, in
relation to healthcare applications requirements as
they share channels with other types of public
traffic. This work looks at various ICT applications
with potential for use in home care, and determines
their latency and bandwidth characteristics over an
HSPA wireless access network.
We have chosen public wireless network
technology because of its wide reach in suburban
and rural areas where home care is more likely to be
a major aspect of a patient’s healthcare regimen. We
considered HSPA in particular because it is the
fastest mobile wireless network that has been widely
deployed by our regional telecommunication
companies. With fast data access, mobile
communication can provide personal or interactive
services virtually anywhere in the service area at
virtually any time.
With the introduction of HSPA in WCDMA
networks, Internet service providers (ISPs) now
have the capability of offering latency sensitive and
simultaneous voice, data and video services over
their mobile wireless networks. We have collected
empirical data over real networks, analyzed the data,
and have come up with recommendations for
applications that can be run through such networks.
This paper is organized in the following order.
The methodology used in the survey is described in
Section 2. The test setup is given in Section 3.
Survey results are presented in Section 4. Network
evaluation for medical data sets is considered in
Section 5, and the paper finishes with some
concluding remarks in Section 6.
2 METHODOLOGY
We chose Strathcona County, near Edmonton,
Alberta as our test site, as that region covers a good
mix of suburban and rural residential areas. We first
mapped out the test area as illustrated in Figure 1.
The survey area is representative of the population
density distribution in the suburban and rural areas
of Strathcona County. We drove through the
indicated route (highlighted in red) and collected
global positioning system (GPS) data, and wireless
information such as received signal strength
indication (RSSI). We also carried out bandwidth
testing at numerous points in the area to simulate
healthcare applications through the network.
Figure 1: Area of interest for Wireless measurement.
3 TEST SETUP
Figure 2 illustrates our HSPA network setup. We
connect to the radio access network (RAN) with an
access service network antenna to create the data
path between the mobile station and the core
network. Detailed network characteristics and
configurations of the core network are unknown to
us, as the local service providers do not like to
divulge this information. All data presented herein is
based on the data we were able to collect through
our own experimental apparatus.
We had the ability to measure the network
performance from two end points, in the field and in
our office in downtown Edmonton In the field, we
measured the upload speed and latency as well as the
download speed and latency through the network.
We set up a laptop computer (denoted as “Server
PC” in the figure) to act as a fixed server running
Darwin streaming server and IxChariot endpoints
(Ixia, 2010) at our Edmonton office. The Server PC
communicated with our field apparatus (the lower
half of the figure) through the HSPA network. We
deemed the Server PC to represent a doctor’s office
or hospital server and the field apparatus to represent
a patient home. The Server PC has an external IP
address to by-pass the office firewall and also to free
it from our office’s network traffic. This ensures that
our test is isolated from whatever is happening
within the office network.
The “Test PC” is the main computer in the field
apparatus (set up in the lead author’s vehicle), and
ran VLC application software and IxChariot
endpoints. VLC was used in the field to stream
video files from the Server PC. IxChariot was used
to test the upload and download speed through the
network. The Test PC was also fitted with a
Logitech QuickCam and a Polycom PVX. This
enabled us to do video conferencing with our
EMPIRICAL SURVEY OF HSPA NETWORKS TO DELIVER MEDICAL APPLICATIONS
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