Mobile bandwidth prediction in the context of emergency medical service

Abstract

For the emergency medical service a reliable sharing and transmitting of medical data and electronic patient records between the ambulance and the hospital is of great importance for the quality of patient care. During the last years new mobile technologies have evolved with much higher bandwidths than before. Nevertheless, the available network bandwidth strongly varies from area to area. In this paper we present an approach to investigate the predictability of the mobile network performance based on the statistical evaluation of the gathered transmission data on frequently used routes. This allows one to pro-actively adapt the available bandwidth to improve the utilization of the mobile network capacity and achieve a more reliable transmission of the medical data. We performed data rate measurements on different routes and derived predictions of the available mobile resources. As a first approach, the predictions are based on the average of former measurements, but taking into account the current position and temporal variation of the mobile resources. Compared with the results obtained through the straightforward reference approach our predictions are more accurate and precise. Consequently, our empirical studies confirm that despite high variations of the available wireless bandwidth reasonable predictions for known routes are possible.