On the Use of Nomadic Relaying for Emergency Telemedicine Services in Indoor Environments

The need for high-quality on-the-spot emergency care necessitates access to reliable broadband connectivity for emergency telemedicine services used by paramedics in the field. In a significant proportion of recorded cases, these medical emergencies would tend to occur in indoor locations. However,broadband wireless connectivity may be of low quality due to poor indoor coverage of macro-cellular public mobile networks, or may be unreliable and/or inaccessible in the case of private Wi-Fi networks. To that end, relaying is emerging as one of promising radio access network techniques that provide coverage gain with improved quality of service. This paper analyzes the use of nomadic relays that could be temporarily deployed close to a building as part of the medical emergency response. The objective is to provide improved indoor coverage for paramedics located within the building for enhanced downlink performance (throughput gain, lower outage probability). For that scenario, we propose a resource sharing algorithm based on static relay link with exclusive assigned subframes at the macro base station (MBS) coupled with access link prioritization for paramedic’s terminals to achieve max-min fairness. Via comprehensive system-level simulations, incorporating standard urban propagation models, the results indicate that paramedics are always able to obtain improved performance when connected via the relay enhanced cell (REC) networks rather than the MBS only.