5G‐based smart healthcare system designing and field trial in hospitals

With the 5G worldwide deployment, the scale of vertical applications is innovated benefit from 5G technologies including MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing), network slicing, etc. Especially for healthcare, 5G had been used for COVID-19 protection and intelligent medical processing. However, limited by the hospital's traditional information infrastructures, those 5G-based healthcare applications are hard to be deployed and most only for demonstration, also isolated from the existing medical systems. So what is the next generation of smart healthcare information infrastructures is the key issue for the long-term development of 5G healthcare applications. Even though the standardized 5G MEC framework has been widely used in many vertical scenarios, it is also hard to satisfy hospital-specific requirements such as hospital-dedicated deployment, medical data security, and various network connections, etc. This paper proposes a 5G-based architecture for smart healthcare information infrastructure, a new network element iGW (industry gateway) is defined, and the smart healthcare dedicated cloud platform iMEP (industry multi-access edge platform) is also introduced here, making it possible to satisfy both the hospital-specific requirements and the long-term evolution. Meanwhile, the implementation methodology and the corresponding field test results are presented, which show the significant network performance gain achieved by the proposed new system structure.