부산대학교 도서관

In the past generation of wireless technologies, support for a wide range of applications and use cases was very limited. However, the introduction of 5G and cellular Internet of Things (IoT) with features such as Ultra Reliable Low Latency (URLLC), Massive Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication, and enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) opens up new possibilities. One such critical application of 5G which is heavily investigated is smart healthcare. Connected smart hospitals, remote at-home patient monitoring, remote surgery over the network, etc. are some of the use cases which are part of smart healthcare. One such use case is smart ambulances which are connected to 5G for real-time data transmission. Ambulances play a critical role in the pre-hospital diagnosis and treatment of patients. Smart ambulances amongst other things should be able to transmit new data from the ambulance and access the historic data recorded in the Electronic Health Registry (EHR) with the intention of reducing the time before the patient is diagnosed or treated. In this paper, the authors have focused on the wireless communication links between ambulances and the smart hospital. The experiments were designed with the goal of evaluating the state of the art of 5G, Long-Term Evolution (LTE), and Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) coverage within a specific region of the country. We identified a specific test region for this experiment and used an ambulance from that area with the network measurement equipment. The authors believe that this work could serve as a good starting point in understanding the current capabilities of the communication networks to support future smart use cases.