Thesis (DTech (Electrical engineering))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, 2007 / Telemedicine has been identified as a tool to distnllUte medical expertise to medically
underserved rural community. However, due to the underdeveloped or non-existent
telecommunication infrastructure, which is needed as the platform for telemedicine, the
full benefits of telemedicine are yet to be realized in most parts of South Africa and
Africa as a whole.
This study aims to explore ways on how to provide lP-based lCI system that can be used
as a communication platform for telemedicine in rural areas. In order to emulate the onsite
face-to-face consultation experience, the rural telemedicine system must be able to
provide quality video transmission. Quality video is also important in order for the
physician at the distant end to be able to make correct diagnosis. Hence the main focus of
this study is on ways ofproviding quality video over lP-based multiservice network.
A conceptual model of a rural area network that can be used for rural telemedicine has
been deVeloped, and different access technologies that can be used for rural areas are
presented. Techniques for compesating IP best effort datagram delivery are provided.
Factors that can affect the quality of video transmission on an lP-based packet network
are identified, and a holistic approach to mitigate them is proposed. That includes
adopting coding techniques that will provide coding efficiency, high quality video that is
consistent at high and low bit rates, resilience to transmission errors, scalability, and
network friendliness, which will result in perceived quality improvement, highcompression
efficiency, and possibility of transportation over different networks.
Secondly, it also includes mechanisms to compensate for packet networks idiosyncrasy,
especially JP best-effort debilities, in order to meet the latency and jitter requirements of
real-time video traffic.
For video coding, H.264 is proposed as it meets most of the encoding requirements listed
above, and for prioritising and protecting.video traffic from JP network's best-effort
debilities a combination of differential services (DiflServ) and multi-protocol label
switching (MPLS) have been adopted, where DiflServ is used for traffic classification
and MPLS is used for traffic engineering and fast-rerouting in the event of route failure.
To verify and validate the proposed solutions, modelling and simulation has been used,
where the Network Simulator (NS-2.93) has been used to simulate network functions,
and PSNR, VQM score and double stimulus impairment scale (DSIS) have been used for
evaluating video quality.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:cput/oai:localhost:20.500.11838/1197 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Malindi, Phumzile |
| Publisher | Cape Peninsula University of Technology |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/za/ |
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