Providing telemedicine services in an infrastructure-based cognitive radio network

Compared to traditional wireless networks, a cognitive radio network (CRN) can be built with much more flexibility. In this article we study the performance of supporting telemedicine traffic in a CRN. We first introduce an infrastructure-based CRN for telemedicine, where cognitive base stations sense available spectrum and forward data for associated healthcare stations. We then present strategies and performance for supporting urgent and real-time periodic telemonitoring traffic in the network. Our results show that satisfactory real-time performance can be achieved for telemedicine traffic.