Reference no: EM13336720

Question

A rural medical centre in Australia plans to improve its services to the community by providing telemedicine and healthcare. The centre has 4 doctors working at a given time and some patients travel over 100km to see a doctor. Currently, when a doctor needs to receive advice from a specialist, the medical centre first sends the reports of the patient to the specialist and then the doctor talks to the specialist over the telephone at a convenient time to both parties. As such, the patient can be advised of the diagnosis only at a later time via the telephone. This procedure delays the diagnosis process considerably.

The centre management has decided to improve the service not only to the patients that visit the centre but also to those living about 200km away by having a small team of mobile doctors and paramedics. The idea of the mobile team is to provide consultations to the needy patients at their homes rather than them having to travel to the centre. The mobile doctors should be able to connect wirelessly to the medical centre and also communicate with the specialists directly. The mobile doctors and the doctors at the medical centre should be able to scan/photograph and send the reports of the patients immediately to the specialists.

Currently, there is only landline telephone connection to the medical centre and the surrounding 200km radius of area but the government plans to provide fibre to premises connections under the National Broadband Network (NBN). Several service providers cover this area with 3G mobile service. Design the network of the medical centre and that of the vehicle of the mobile doctors. Draw the network diagrams of both and describe your design in words. Your design should consider suitable IP addresses and devices, network security, redundancy, scalability and cost issues.

Note: You need to undertake a serious literature research on such mobile networks and medical centres, and associated medical and communication equipment required. You need to

a) list the assumptions made. - Note: The assumptions are not the requirements that are provided in the task. They are the additional requirements that you need for your design.

b) provide the network diagrams.

c) describe your design.

d) justify your design.

e) list the networking and communication devices required, including the IP addresses, product numbers, the cost of each and the approximate total cost.

f) select a suitable Internet service provider and show the associated approximate annual cost.

g) discuss in about 500 words, if the centre and the patients are going to benefit from the planned NBN. You need to discuss the advantages and the disadvantages both.