TITLE:
Determining Requirements for an Optimal Ad-Hoc Multicast Protocol in Mobile Health Care Training Systems
AUTHORS:
Anis Zarrad, Ahmed Redha Mahlous
KEYWORDS:
Ad-Hoc, Multicast Protocol, Health Care Training System, 3D Virtual Environment, E-Health
JOURNAL NAME:
Communications and Network,
Vol.7 No.2,
April
9,
2015
ABSTRACT: Nowadays, Health Care Training-based System
(HCTS) is a vital component in the education and training of health care in 3D
Virtual Environment (VE). The practice of HCTS continues to grow at rapid pace
throughout all of the healthcare disciplines, however research in this field is
still in its early stage. Increasingly, decision makers and developers look
forward to offer more sophisticated, much larger, and more complex HCTS to
serve the desired outcome and improve the quality and safety of patient care. Due
to the rapidly increasing usage of personal mobile devices and the need of
executing HCTS applications in environments that have no previous network
infrastructure available, Mobile Health Care Training-based System (MHCTS) is
an expected future trend. In such systems, medical staff will share and
collaborate in a 3D virtual environment through their mobile devices in an
ad-hoc network (MANET) in order to accomplish specific missions’ typically
surgical emergency room. Users are organized into various groups (Radiologists,
Maternity departments, and General surgery etc...), and need to be managed by a
multicast scheme to save network bandwidth and offer immersive sense. MHCTS is
sensitive to networking issues, since interactive 3D graphics requires additional
load due to the use of mobile devices. Therefore, we need to emphasize on the
importance and the improvement of multicast techniques for the effectiveness of
MHCTS and the management of collaborative group interaction. Research so far
has devoted little attention to the network communication protocols design of
such systems which is crucial to preserve the sense of immersion for
participating users. In this paper, we investigate the effect of multicast
routing protocol in advancing the field of Health care Training-based System to
the benefit of patient’s safety, and health care professional. Also, we address
the issue of selecting a multicast protocol to provide the best performance for
a particular e-health system at any time. Previous work has demonstrated that
multicast operates at least as efficiently as traditional MAODV. A
comprehensive analysis about various ad-hoc multicast routing protocols is
proposed. The selection key factors for the right protocol for MHCTS
applications were safety and robustness. To the best of our knowledge, this
work will be the first initiative involving systematic literature reviews to
identify a research gate for the use of multicast protocol in health care
simulation learning community.