Using mobile clouds in medical ICT scenarios: A preliminary study

In this paper medical ICT scenarios are considered where a user/patient communicates to a base station with the help of one or more mobile devices in its close proximity. The system model assumes all the wireless devices cooperate in a mobile cloud. First of all, we identify medical ICT scenarios and select the most promising ones where the concept of mobile cloud can be readily exploited. Two cooperative strategies are modeled and compared, namely a) the best out of m nodes in the cloud is used as a relay, and b) all nodes participate in relaying. Performance is studied in terms of outage probability, as reliability is essential in medical applications. The approach based on best-node outperforms the all-node approach. This method is also energy-efficient as it engages only one relying device at a time. This is important from a practical standpoint. This initial study finds that using mobile clouds in medical scenarios is an attractive solution.