On the use of home node Bs for emergency telemedicine applications in various indoor environments

The use of emergency telemedicine applications at the site of a medical emergency event provides a multitude of benefits, both from the perspective of the patient and the emergency care providers. Innovations in rich multimedia telemedicine solutions further enhances the aforementioned benefits, but places more stringent quality-of-service demands on the underlying mobile networks. In this paper, the authors present a proposal for a complementary solution for rapid provisioning of mobile broadband data connectivity for emergency telemedicine applications in indoor environments. The proposed solution relies on the exploitation of existing femtocellular network resources available at emergency sites in various residential building types. Simulations carried out for a UMTS network environment demonstrate significant improvements in terms of achievable throughput for the emergency mobile terminal device when access to UMTS Home Node Bs available in the building is allowed for emergencies compared to macro Node B access only.