Eduardo Viruete

Proposal of an ISO/IEEE11073 Platform for Healthcare Telemonitoring: Plug-and-Play Solution with new Use Cases

Remote patient monitoring in e-Health is everyday closer to be a mature technology/service. However, there is still a lack of development in areas such as standardization of the sensors communication interface, integration into electronic healthcare record systems or incorporation in ambient-intelligent scenarios. This work identifies a set of use cases involved in the personal monitoring scenario and highlights the related features and functionalities, as well as the integration and implementation difficulties found when these are to be implemented in a system based on the ISO/IEEE11073 (X73) standard. It is part of a cooperative research effort devoted to the development of an end-to-end standards-based telemonitoring solution. Standardization committees are working towards adapting the X73 standard to this emerging personal health devices market and use case identification is essential to direct these revisions.

First person shooters: can a smarter network save bandwidth without annoying the players?

Real-time services are very challenging for current network infrastructures. One of these services is online gaming, which has acquired more importance in the last years. The quality experienced by users could be improved by the use of a smarter network, which includes some proxies near the players in order to transfer intelligence from the game server to network borders. Proxies have been largely used for other services, such as web browsing and VoIP. First Person Shooters are a popular genre of online games that generate high rates of small packets. This issue becomes important in some scenarios where many flows of a game share the same path, as would happen between a proxy and the central server of a game. These flows could be multiplexed to improve efficiency by reducing packet overhead, thus allowing a bigger number of players to share the same link. A method named Tunneling, Compressing, and Multiplexing (TCM) has been proposed to multiplex these flows. In this article, this method has been tested using the traffic of eight popular First Person Shooters. The method has shown its ability to achieve bandwidth savings of about 30 percent for IPv4 and above 50 percent for IPv6 for all the games. The added delay and jitter are small enough to not annoy players.

QoS Measurement-Based CAC for an IP Telephony System

This work presents a Call Admission Control (CAC) system for a SIP-based IP Telephony platform. Configured for a multi-branch enterprise environment, the system enables international calls to be established in two steps: one step using Voice over IP (VoIP) through the Internet between the local office and a VoIP-PSTN gateway placed at destination country, and a second step by means of PSTN, from the gateway to the end-user, accounted with local tariffs. CAC decisions are based on Quality of Service (QoS) measurements, call tariffs and also on the number of available lines in the gateway. The CAC has been implemented within a test platform based on virtualization. Measurements to evaluate and validate CAC’s impairment on call establishment delays have been obtained.

Hybrid testbed for network scenarios

In this paper we explain the deployment of a testbed that emulates a network by means of virtualization, allowing us to implement a set of virtual nodes in one physical machine or a small LAN. Nodes participating in the communication are virtual machines adequately connected. The system is a hybrid testbed, as it includes simulation and emulation. But simulations are done in a previous offline stage, in order to avoid computer load caused by the need of real-time simulations, which could limit the maximum number of hosts to be included into the scenario. Finally, two uses of the testbed are presented.

Comparative of Multiplexing Policies for Online Gaming in Terms of QoS Parameters

This letter compares different policies for multiplexing the traffic of online games. In order to achieve bandwidth savings and to alleviate the high packet rate, headers are compressed and a number of native packets are included into a bigger one, using PPPMux and an L2TP tunnel. Small and controlled delays and jitter are added due to retention at the queue of the multiplexer. The policies are compared using real traffic traces of a popular game, and the results show that the savings are significant, while the impairments are not severe.

Application Parameters Optimization to Guarantee QoS in e-Health Services

The wide development of multimedia clinical applications and the use of inter and intra-hospital communication networks require a specific analysis to increase the efficiency of e-Health services. In this paper we study the optimum combinations of the application parameters needed to fulfil the quality of service (QoS) thresholds according to monitored network measurements in the new healthcare services. A remote diagnosis service has been evaluated establishing good-performance areas, depending on available resources

Performance Evaluation of Rural e-Health Scenarios: Users and QoS Management

The development of e-health services in rural environments, where broadband accesses are usually not available, requires a specific analysis of available resources to improve the management of quality of service (QoS). This work studies the sharing of resources among several users and the system efficiency in rural areas, guaranteeing QoS. The results obtained show that, with the premises considered in this study, a rural centre can establish a maximum number of simultaneous real-time services with the hospital, which varies between 2 and 3 for each 64 kb/s of available link capacity

Users dimensioning and traffic modelling in rural e-Health services

The development of e-Health services in rural environments, where broadband networks are usually not accessible, requires a specific analysis of available resources to improve Quality of Service (QoS) management. This work quantifies the maximum number of simultaneous users that fulfill the specific QoS levels in common e-Health services, including both store-and-forward and real-time telemedicine applications. The analysis also proposes variations in the modelling of traffic distributions regarding the number of multiplexed users. The results obtained in this study permit an accurate users dimensioning, which is necessary to optimize the performance and to guarantee the QoS requirements in this kind of services where network resources are limited.