Design and dimensioning strategies for telemedicine backbone networks with optical links

Telemedicine is an effective solution that provides medical aid from a distance. Provision of improved access to the health care facility economically to the rural population distributed across a wide area in our country is a challenging task. There is a need to go for a backbone telemedicine network that facilitates the availability of not just the basic health care, but also the futuristic applications to the rural population of India. This paper proposes the design and dimensioning strategies for terrestrial telemedicine backbone networks with optical links. This works aims to overcome the limitations of satellite communication in telemedicine and to provide high bandwidth links to accommodate high end medical applications like real time medical imaging and robotic surgery. The hospitals in metropolitan cities, major cities and remote locations are interconnected in a hierarchical way. The capacity is allocated to the links according to their hierarchal level, and among the links in the same level, cities are identified based on their significance and assigned with additional capacity. The performance is evaluated for three different data rates and the robustness to traffic variations is also estimated.