5G Technologies Based Remote E-Health: Architecture, Applications, and Solutions

TL;DR

This paper presents a 5G-enabled remote e-health architecture addressing healthcare resource disparities, with applications in telemedicine, epidemic prevention, and a caching strategy for efficient data management.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive 5G-based remote e-health architecture, including epidemic prevention schemes and a novel caching strategy for medical data.

Findings

Effective high-speed transmission of medical data via 5G

Enhanced resource sharing among remote hospitals

Proposed caching strategy improves data access efficiency

Abstract

Currently, many countries are facing the problems of aging population, serious imbalance of medical resources supply and demand, as well as uneven geographical distribution, resulting in a huge demand for remote e-health. Particularly, with invasions of COVID-19, the health of people and even social stability have been challenged unprecedentedly. To contribute to these urgent problems, this article proposes a general architecture of the remote e-health, where the city hospital provides the technical supports and services for remote hospitals. Meanwhile, 5G technologies supported telemedicine is introduced to satisfy the high-speed transmission of massive multimedia medical data, and further realize the sharing of medical resources. Moreover, to turn passivity into initiative to prevent COVID-19, a broad area epidemic prevention and control scheme is also investigated, especially for the remote areas. We discuss their principles and key features, and foresee the challenges, opportunities, and future research trends. Finally, a node value and content popularity based caching strategy is introduced to provide a preliminary solution of the massive data storage and low-latency transmission.