W I R E L E S S T E C H N O L O G I E S F O R E-H E A LT H C A R E

WIRELESS TELEMEDICINE SERVICES OVER INTEGRATED IEEE 802.11/WLAN AND IEEE 802.16/WIMAX NETWORKS
YAN ZHANG AND NIRWAN ANSARI, NEW JERSEY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY HIROSHI TSUNODA, TOHOKU INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

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The authors investigate the application of integrated IEEE 802.16/WiMAX and IEEE 802.11/ WLAN broadband wireless access technologies along with the related protocol issues for telemedicine services.

Wireless telemedicine, also referred to as mobile health, which capitalizes on advances of wireless technologies to deliver health care and exchange medical knowledge anywhere and …ver más…

The major goal of MTaiwan is to build a standard-compliant environment as the foundation for lifestyle applications such as M-Service, M-Learning, and M-Life. In order to deliver such applications, WiMAX is expected to be the preferred technology. WEIRD aims to support novel applications, such as fire prevention, environmental monitoring, and telemedicine via WiMAX. Fourtest beds deployed in

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IEEE Wireless Communications • February 2010

Europe have been used to implement, test, and validate the technical solutions developed within the WEIRD project. Various advanced medical applications such as remote follow-up, remote diagnosis, intervention on non-transportable patients, remote monitoring, remote assistance, and medical e-learning are expected to be improved by using WiMAX. The remainder of this article is organized as follows. First, we briefly review WLAN and WiMAX technologies. Afterward, a comparison between IEEE 802.11/WLAN and IEEE 802.16/ WiMAX is presented. A general telemedicine system architecture and telemedicine QoS requirements are introduced. Then some research open issues in the integrated IEEE 802.16/WiMAX and IEEE 802.11/WLAN networks are discussed, especially on QoS support, radio resource management, scheduling and connection admission control schemes, as well as handover and mobility management. Finally, application and deployment scenarios of integrated IEEE 802.16/WiMAX and IEEE