Developing Quality of Service Mechanisms for Telemedicine in Constrained Battlefield Environments

Telemedicine has become a widespread method of care delivery in the commercial and civilian world, especially after its necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic. This trend continues to grow as there is increased reliance on communications technology and its integration with medical equipment. It is anticipated that telemedicine will become more commonplace for patients even beyond the pandemic, including in the tactical battlefield environment, where it will focus on prolonged field care. When considering a tactical battlefield environment, communications capabilities are often limited.The contributions discussed in this paper focus on the development of a generalized, systematic process by which battlefield telemedicine scenarios focused on prolonged field care can be mapped to networking performance metrics. This is based on a framework to develop Quality of Service ( QoS) requirements for battlefield telemedicine scenarios, using a composite of established mechanisms from standardization communities as a starting point, for the purposes of efficiently provisioning limited communications and networking resources in the battlefield. In addition to this framework, the paper discusses the setup of a telemedicine QoS testbed focused on video and voice quality assessment to determine both quantitative and qualitative requirements for battlefield telemedicine scenarios.