5G-Enabled Medical Data Transmission in Mobile Hospital Systems

As one of the healthcare development trends, mobile hospital systems nowadays need more advanced means of treatment and diagnosis and require higher data transmission speed and capacity with lower latency. With its ability to simultaneously support a variety of services in a wide range of application scenarios using network slicing technique, the emerging fifth generation communication system (5G) is expected to offer significant communication performances, including higher throughput, higher mobility, higher connection density, higher transmission reliability with lower latency than the current fourth generation (4G). Hence, 5G can serve as an effective transmission means to meet the modern mobile hospital systems requirements. This article proposes a 5G network slicing-based mobile hospital system where two types of slices, namely, enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) slice and ultrareliable and low-latency communications (uRLLC) slice, are dedicated to the medical data. We propose an optimization method to maximize the throughput of the medical data assigned to the eMBB slice. We also propose a resource allocation algorithm for very high transmission reliability with very low latency of the medical data assigned to the uRLLC slice. Simulation results indicate that our proposed approach can effectively meet mobile hospital systems requirements for data transmission throughput, reliability, and latency from remote sites to hospital centers.