CURATE: On-Demand Orchestration of Services for Health Emergencies Prediction and Mitigation

Telemedicine, or the ability granted to doctors to remotely assist patients has been greatly benefited by advances in IoT, network communications, Machine Learning and Edge/Cloud computing. With the impeding arrival of 5G, virtualized infrastructures and cloud-native approaches enable the execution of unprecedented procedures during such patient/doctor interactions, allowing medical professionals to e.g. request higher granularity metrics from patients' telemetry equipment, or perform on-demand data mining/processing of patient's stored data in order to provide a more educated diagnostic or prediction. In this work we coalesce the virtues of virtualized infrastructures and IoT into a solution able to satisfy increasing data processing demands for eHealth, e.g. for telemedicine applications, remote assistance or patient pre-screening procedures. The proposed platform, CURATE, leverages Network Functions Virtualisation Management and Orchestration (NFV MANO) for the on-demand instantiation of the required virtual resources on the operator's infrastructure, as well as the concept of 5G Network Slices to guarantee efficient resource allocation and tenant isolation. Results show the proposed platform is able to efficiently make use of the available hardware resources via Network Slices, as well as provide cost-effective service guarantees employing dynamic scaling operations.