Exploiting 5G slicing to support remote medical care

This Catalyst aims to enable service delivery to medical facilities internationally via virtual 5G slices. The project addresses artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and the use of virtual intelligent counselling agents (VICA) in use cases including remote patient care. 5G networks offering low latency and high performance are crucial to support these services.

Now in its fourth phase, this project is led jointly by Orange and NTT and is also championed by Telecom Italia Sparkle, Chunghwa Telecom, the IOTA Foundation and Telecom Italia (TIM). Further support is provided by vendors Mavenir and Maruka as well as the University of Milan and Meiji University.

Experience gained during the coronavirus pandemic has shown that many medical services can be provided remotely. This trend will accelerate with the digital transformation of medical care and the introduction of 5G slicing.

In this context, the use of VR and VICA require high performance and low latency at the edge as well as an application-friendly ecosystem that is open to a community of developers. For mission-critical applications related to health, high availability and performance are required. Measuring and ensuring service level agreements for end-to-end services is therefore a key capability.

Building with intent

Frederic Desnoes, Project Director at Orange, explained that the

Ecosoft eHealth

Catalyst builds on work carried out in the first phases in relation to end-to-end services that use 5G technology. By collaborating with the medical and technical universities in Milan and Tokyo as well as with leading medical solution providers, the project will expand on the inter-carrier fulfilment and assurance aspects that were explored in phase 3 of the catalyst,

Ghost in the Shell

, and relies on Mavenir, IOTA, and Maruka for the proof of concept.

“We now want to go a step further and extend this work to actual use cases in the medical domain,” Desnoes explained. “In order to achieve this, we need to provide missing elements such as agility and assuring and securing complex services that are obtained by aggregating simpler ones. We need a trusted and auditable service composition that also ensures confidentiality, as well as addressing high-quality demands, and business needs.”

What solution does the catalyst team plan to implement?

“First, we aim at deploying edge technologies, possibly dynamically located depending on need, for addressing strong computational requirements,” said Desnoes. “For this we plan to use intelligent, autonomous networks that we are able to auto reconfigure in case of need. And we want also to use intent-based networking, which enables collaboration and aggregation of services by using intent at all layers, using end-to-end service and business requirements as the ‘glue’.”

Essentially, this project is taking an intent-based approach to remote medical use cases to prioritise and secure mission-critical traffic. Key goals of the project include enabling operational automation and dynamic scalability of inter-carrier network resources. The catalyst will also address service ordering, provisioning, assurance, billing and quality of experience.

Desnoes points to the fact that the pandemic has demonstrated how it is possible to rely on technology for remote working and training.

“We believe there is no limit to the expertise we can deploy. We only need to enable end users to easily manage the complexity, and to ensure reliability, by enabling auditable processes that gives the necessary trust in these critical services,” he said.

Any company, be it an eHealth provider, communications service provider (CSP), or independent vendor, can propose a marketplace for professional health services that rely on network services which are trusted and auditable thanks to the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Desnoes noted that a CSP is able to exploit its high-quality connectivity capabilities here, for example.

Next steps

The Catalyst members have also aligned the project with three United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:

3.Goodhealth and well-being.

9.Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure.

17.Partnerships for the Goals.

With that in mind, the goal for the next iteration is to convince more vendors to join the team and to build a new Catalyst aiming at providing more software integration capabilities between CSPs and the 5G ecosystem with the aim of enabling the composition of services (or micro-services).

The Catalyst is leveraging and contributing towards several TM Forum assets. It relies on both the Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and the Autonomous Network Project, for example. Intent-based networking with the Intent APIs is currently under development, and the team aims to add value through integration with DLT to ensure the consistency and security of data ( when necessary). It also uses a number of TM Forum Open APIs, among other assets.