Enhancing home area networks to facilitate telehealth services: Test-bed scenario with video-consultation-calls (VCC)

Recent years have witnessed rapid development of Telehealth applications and the integration of portable devices to facilitate services such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP), Video-over-IP and distribution of other data types e.g., medical images and health sensor data. In line with Telehelath, Home Area Network (HAN) has also seen broad deployments and has expanded conventional households to support latest electronic devices that are equipped with network connectivity. Telehealth applications are starting to be designed to take advantages of the HAN environment and are providing healthcare at the patients home, i.e., facilitates hospital at home via video-consultation-call (VCC). However, some of these Telehealth applications are highly delay sensitive and require higher bandwidth priority and a network load-balancing system in order to produce best quality of service (QoS). We observed that typical HAN is established without bandwidth priority and network-load-balancing systems. This lack of management causes HAN to produce unacceptable QoS for Telehealth applications. In this scenario, we propose a scheme to enhance HAN while providing better quality of VCC to support Telehealth services. Our scheme controls the Internet traffic within the HAN network infrastructure environment. In our experimental setting, we implemented a real network test-bed based on HAN where two-way Skype VCC was established and the quality of packet-loss was measured. Skype was chosen for its wide availability and support on all types of computing devices (PC, mobile, laptop etc.). Our results indicate that packet-loss fluctuates between ~5–16% when user datagram protocol (UDP) traffic is utilised concurrently by other devices in HAN. It also demonstrated that our scheme could enhance HAN performance for VCC as it reduced packet-loss down to ~0.3 %.