QoS Study Performance of an Integrated Satellite Telemedicine Platform

This paper describes a wide-area tele-medicine platform, specially suited for homecare services, based on the DVB-RCS and Wi-Fi communication technologies. Implementation of DVB-RCS, utilizing dynamic assignment techniques mandated in the DVB-RCS specification, has been specifically designed and tuned for multimedia and high-speed data transfer. The monitored patients can be practically anywhere, even in geographically dispersed and isolated areas, where normally there is no terrestrial communications infrastructure capable of supporting similar services. The presented platform combines medical data acquisition and transfer, patient remote monitoring and teleconference services. Possible operational scenarios simulated and results regarding available data rates, quality of service (QoS) provision, and prioritization of tele-monitoring, videoconference and medical data transfer are provided and discussed in the paper.