Medical Quality of Service for Wireless Ultrasound Streaming in Robotic Tele-Ultrasonography System

Abstract

Mobile healthcare (m-health) is an emerging research area. There are two critical issues facing successful deployment of m-health applications from the wireless communications perspectives. First, wireless connectivity issues and mobility requirements of real-time bandwidth demanding m-health applications. Second, are the Quality of Service (QoS) issues from the healthcare perspective and their required levels to guarantee robust and clinically acceptable healthcare services. In this paper, we consider the concept of medical QoS (m-QoS) issues for typical bandwidth demanding m-health application (tele-ultrasound streaming) in 3G environments. Specifically we introduce this new concept of m-QoS that provide a sub-category of quality of services from the m-health perspective. To validate this concept we also propose a new optimal rate control policy based on Q-learning approach to deliver the ultrasound images over 3G environment.