5G-Based Smart Healthcare Network: Architecture, Taxonomy, Challenges and Future Research Directions

Healthcare is undergoing a rapid transformation from traditional hospital and specialist focused approach to a distributed patient-centric approach. Advances in several technologies fuel this rapid transformation of healthcare vertical. Among various technologies, communication technologies have enabled to deliver personalized and remote healthcare services. At present, healthcare widely uses the existing 4G network and other communication technologies for smart healthcare applications and are continually evolving to accommodate the needs of future intelligent healthcare applications. As the smart healthcare market expands the number of applications connecting to the network will generate data that will vary in size and formats. This will place complex demands on the network in terms of bandwidth, data rate, and latency, among other factors. As this smart healthcare market matures, the connectivity needs for a large number of devices and machines with sensor-based applications in hospitals will necessitate the need to implement Massive-Machine Type Communication. Further use cases such as remote surgeries and Tactile Internet will spur the need for Ultra Reliability and Low Latency Communications or Critical Machine Type Communication. The existing communication technologies are unable to fulfill the complex and dynamic need that is put on the communication networks by the diverse smart healthcare applications. Therefore, the emerging 5G network is expected to support smart healthcare applications, which can fulfill most of the requirements such as ultra-low latency, high bandwidth, ultra-high reliability, high density, and high energy efficiency. The future smart healthcare networks are expected to be a combination of the 5G and IoT devices which are expected to increase cellular coverage, network performance and address security-related concerns. This paper provides a state-of-the-art review of the 5G and IoT enabled smart healthcare, Taxonomy, research trends, challenges, and future research directions.