Cost-effective deployment of communication resources for a home health telecare system for the elderly

This paper presents a communications infrastructure to provide a home telecare service to cover the territory of Andalusia (Spain) with the requirements of a high quality of service and cost efficiency. After analyzing several alternatives based on different access technologies, it is shown that X.25-based packet-switched networks provide the best results in terms of scalability, cost for the user and grade of service. A communications protocol has been developed for the transmission of the data, and an analysis of the PDU-Iength is performed to minimize the cost for the user.