Satellite integrated heterogeneous architecture for professional health services

The global availability, strong resiliency and bandwidth management capability of the satellite technology together with the need of ICT solutions for the provision of reliable e-health services lead to the development of innovative technological mechanisms to be adopted in a comprehensive network resources management system for integrated professional medical services. A new paradigm of satellite telemedicine is proposed by the European Space Agency project, KosmoMed. Its aim is to design, develop, deploy and validate an ICT Professional Medical Platform for the delivery of innovative applications through an integrated satellite terrestrial network. To satisfy the end-user requirements in terms of perceived quality, a distributed booking databases system for the network resource management has been developed. A user-transparent system that automatically adapts the satellite bandwidth resources and activates the proper quality of service (QoS) strategies based on the requested service has been implemented. The overall system has been validated and an experimental campaign has been carried out. The fulfilment of the identified requirements is demonstrated by the QoS and quality of experience (QoE) results. This paper describes the solution proposed for the dynamic management of the bandwidth resources and provides an overview of the achieved results and lesson learnt.