Telemedicine Services over Rural Broadband Wireless Access Technologies: IEEE 802.22/WRAN and IEEE 802.16 WiMAX

Telemedicine services represent restrictive applications mostly related to patient’s consultation, diagnosis and monitoring through their biomedical signals by health specialists. Since wireless telemedicine services depend on technological infrastructure, rural area coverage has been considered an important challenge, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.16/WiMAX standard has been used to provide broadband wireless access (BWA) because of its MAC and PHY characteristics. However, the switch-off of the analog terrestrial network presents the opportunity of delivering high data rates over large coverage areas by means of TV white spaces (TVWS) technology using cognitive radio capabilities. Hence, at the end of 2011 the IEEE Working Group for Wireless Regional Area Networks (WRAN) released the first TVWS standard named 802.22. Within this standard bandwidth availability depends on the geographical location of the base station (BS) and the customer premise equipment (CPE).Therefore, a model to evaluate the suitability of IEEE 802.22 and WiMAX for the deployment of rural telemedicine networks is proposed. The model considers specific traffic profiles based on the telemedicine services that will be offered over the rural wireless telemedicine network. The evaluation presented in this chapter is performed by calculating the number of telemedicine services that IEEE 802.22/WRAN and IEEE 802.16/WiMAX networks can support considering the available bandwidth and the telemedicine traffic profiles requirements. Frame preambles and a MAC/PHY overhead factor per active connection are considered within the analysis. A case study from the State of Chiapas, Mexico, is presented for the deployment of wireless rural telemedicine networks based on the IEEE 802.16/WiMAX and IEEE 802.22/WRAN standards.