Reliability for Smart Healthcare: A Network Slicing Perspective

Pursuing improvements in the healthcare system is mandatory for its efficiency and cost reduction. The fast popularization of implantable and wearable sensors promotes the diversity of healthcare applications and services, ranging from real-time and critical care monitoring to telemedicine. For smart healthcare (s-health), reliability plays an essential role, given the sensitivity of its data and services. In this article, we envision an architecture based on network slicing that can provide reliability for s-health applications and services. The architecture relies on fingerprinting healthcare applications to quickly customize resources and meet the level of reliability required for each s-health application. A fingerprinting study case is presented for s-health, based on a dataset containing real traffic. Results show that application fingerprinting reaches 90 percent accuracy, assisting in network customization. Finally, we discuss the main open issues and opportunities that network slicing technology provides for s-health.