A Self-Manageable Network Infrastructure Towards Supporting Healthcare Transport Communication

Abstract

EHealth has played an essential role in improving human life since its inception. Thanks to the advancements in Wireless communication and Software-defined Networks, the most demanding requirements of modern eHealth applications are resolved in their convergence, the 5th Communication Technology Generation. Besides, the cutting-edge technology also renovated the eHealth network landscape by employing Network Function Virtualization and Network Slicing concepts. By allowing third-party actors to manage and operate pre-deployed network infrastructure, 5G presented a novel network perspective that outdated the classic network research point of view. Recognizing such outstanding phenomenon, we update the eHealth literature by addressing the 5G's network perspective transformation. More importantly, we take a further step and present our enhanced vision to the community. The given network perspective emphasizes flexibility and adaptability regarding network infrastructure, which later aims to complete the 5G's current landscape. As the final result, we provide the community with a next-generation vision towards a unified, fully automated, and adaptively self-manageable network infrastructure. Four distinguished experimental approaches that support Healthcare transport communication (Opportunistic Network Enhancement, Connection Recovery, Self-assisted Coverage Deployment, and Data Transportation, and Priority Orchestration in High-density Network) are also designed to ensure the efficiency of the proposed idea. Our result analysis indicates that the proposed approach allows better network metrics (throughput, latency, and packet loss), especially in vehicular ad-hoc network environment, after enhancing the existing network infrastructure.