JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

To date, the differentiated requirement for network performance in different scenarios of healthcare service within, outside, and between hospitals is still a key challenge restricting the development of digital medical services.

Objective:

The purpose of this study is to construct and implement a private 5G Standalone (SA) medical network in a smart health environment, to meet the needs for a variety of medical service scenarios.

Methods:

Based on the requirements analysis of network differentiation in medical applications, the system architecture and function positioning of the proposed private 5G SA medical network are designed and implemented. Medical exclusive channel, medical preferential channel, and ordinary user channel are developed to compose the system architecture of the 5G network. Three-layer network function architecture, network resource, network control, and intelligent operation, is designed to provide management arrangement and network open services upward. Core technologies including access network slicing, bearing network slicing, core network slicing, edge cloud collaboration, and service aware are employed during the construction and application of the 5G network.

Results:

The construction of the private 5G SA medical network mainly involves medical application system, information communication standards, and network security mechanism. Exclusive channel, preferential channel, and common channel are constructed to support various medical applications. Relevant standards are followed to ensure the interaction and sharing of medical service information. The security of the 5G network is achieved through security authentication, abnormal behavior analysis, and dynamic access control. Three medical applications relied on the proposed 5G network in intra-hospital, inter-hospital, and out-of-hospital scenarios, namely, mobile ward rounds, remote first aid, and remote ultrasound are conducted. The network test of the 5G enabled robot assisted mobile ward rounds shows that the average download rate is 790 Mb/s, while the average upload rate is 91 Mb/s. Relative to 4G, the 5G network can better meet the needs of various types of business bearing in the pre-hospital emergency scenario. For the remote ultrasound, the average downlink rate of the 5G network is 4.82 Mb/s, and the average uplink rate is 2 Mb/s, with an average fluctuation of about 8ms. The bandwidth, performance under network congestion, and delay of the 5G network are also examined and confirmed to perform well.

Conclusions:

The private 5G SA medical network proposed in this study performs well in typical medical applications such as mobile ward rounds, remote first aid, and remote ultrasound. The construction and application of the private 5G medical network could give birth to a series of new medical service models, and provide helpful references for the development and implementation of private networks in other industries in China and globally.