Telemedicine via Satellite: Improving Access to Healthcare for Remote Rural Communities in Africa

Abstract

In this paper, realistic telemedicine implementation scenarios with architecture are proposed to help in extending quality healthcare using satellite and integrated satellite-terrestrial networks (ISTNs). Telemedicine is the use of telecommunications and information technology to extend healthcare service delivery to underserved, remotely isolated communities. Global coverage, broadcast/multicast capability and the high capacity of satellites in Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) could potentially serve as a tool to extend quality healthcare to underserved remote rural areas. However, Long End-to-End latency or Round-Trip-Time (RTT) attributed to the GEO satellites could degrade the performance of data communications leading underutilisation of the high available capacity due to high link errors and the long latency, particularly when using Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) over the internet, which accounts for about 90% of the internet traffic today. The actual latency (RTT) of GEO satellites is about 1700ms to 3000ms, which could lead to capacity utilisation as low as 39% of maximum 464kbps available capacity of our testbed service provider. However, TCP Performance could be improved by adopting other transmission protocols which we are currently testing and investigating possible modifications for even more enhance performance over satellite and hybrid (ISTN) channels network environment.