Requirements and Enablers of Advanced Healthcare Services over Future Cellular Systems

The fifth generation (5G) of cellular networks has ambitious targets of data rate, end-to-end latency, and connection reliability. With the recent spreading of information and communication technology (ICT) into healthcare, leading to an Internet of medical things, new e-health services are being offered, in particular to the elderly population who needs daily assistance. This paper aims at identifying the most representative healthcare scenarios that can benefit from 5G networks and synthesizing the communications requirements in these particular scenarios. The impact of three key 5G technologies, i.e., medical network slices, mobile edge computing, and the management of heterogeneous networks, will be discussed in the representative case study of the connected ambulance.