Exploiting mobile clouds to enhance communication reliability in medical ICT scenarios:a preliminary study

Medical ICT applications have developed significantly during the past years. In particular, wireless and mobile communications have provided healthcare with efficient, flexible and cost-effective solutions. Mobile networks can be used as the infrastructure supporting remote monitoring of patients. However, wireless and mobile networks are inherently unreliable, while medical ICT applications must be highly reliable. Mobile Cloud (MC) is a new and promising paradigm, which allows proximate mobile users to establish short-range connections as well as being connected through their cellular access. A mobile cloud is defined as an opportunistic cooperative cluster of wireless devices in close proximity (i.e., short-range), where each device can also be connected to access points or base stations, even simultaneously. A mobile cloud can be utilized as a possible communication technology to provide high reliability data transmission on health monitoring devices. This new paradigm is proposed to minimize the outage probability by the cooperative diversity offered by the collaborative devices in the cloud. Most of the prior works on MC are focused on the energy efficiency improvement in the nodes of mobile clouds. Four medical ICT scenarios are considered that can use mobile clouds to improve the reliability of data transmission in this thesis. The proposed scenarios are classified based on their typical use and key communication requirements. A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) monitors the health or wellbeing condition of the user. Moreover, a mobile or smart-phone owned by the user/patient acts as a gateway device which collecting the measured data from the WBAN. The monitored user exploits a MC with other communication-enabled devices in its close proximity. The studied MC is operated in a single-cell involves cellular users and one BS. The Selection Amplify-and-Forward (S-AF) and All-participate Amplify-and-Forward (AP-AF) cooperative algorithms are proposed to minimize the outage probability of the system. In the S-AF case, the best node with highest transmitted SNR is selected and retransmits the data. The selection is done at the BS side. The AP-AF algorithm uses all the cooperating devices in the cloud for relaying the data. Both algorithms applied TDMA fashion for relaying the signal. The performance of the proposed algorithms is compared with the non-cooperative transmission link. Simulation results illustrate that the offered MC model is capable to achieve significant performance gains over the non-cooperative case in terms of outage probability. Results also show that the outage probability is highly affected by the cloud size in both approaches. The S-AF scheme offers the best performance in minimizing the outage probability compared to the AP-AF and non-cooperative cases