Zero Roaming Solution for Healthcare

Background:

The development of WLAN helps solve many problems in the work of traditional medical staff. Hence, mobile healthcare is popularized and plays a crucial role in scenarios such as patient applications, diagnosis and treatment applications, nursing applications, and in-house decision-making.

In December 2017, the National Health Commission formulated the Technical Guide for the Application of Hospital Informatization Construction to standardize and promote the information system construction of secondary and above hospitals. This guide clarified the specific content of mobile terminals, mobile infusion services, and mobile ward rounds. The development of mobile healthcare is more and more inseparable from the application of information technology under the support of various emerging technologies.

User needs:

Service continuity assurance. Nurses and doctors need to hold mobile terminals for ward rounds. During the movement, the terminals need to switch APs according to the signal strength. In the traditional wireless networking solution, this process is often interrupted. Moreover, there are signal dead points due to wall thickness and room structure, resulting in poor user experiences.

Bandwidth assurance. Some solutions on the market solve the problem of service interruption during roaming, but they cannot guarantee access quality. When medical staff use mobile terminals for work, they often face problems such as packet loss, slow PDA connection, and wireless interference.

O&M efficiency assurance. A convenient and fast solution is needed for system upgrade and maintenance and fault location when deploying a large number of APs.

Solution:

The H3C wireless zero roaming solution for healthcare is one of the few wireless solutions put forward by H3C in the industry, which solves the problem of signal in multiple rooms and service continuity of hospitals. The solution uses a design of "main AP + sub APs". Compared with the traditional AC+Fit AP solution, it adds the role of "main AP". The CAPWAP protocol is still used to encapsulate data and manage packets between the AC and the main AP. The sub APs and the main AP are encapsulated in wireless formats. The wireless packets are directly processed by the main AP, and the sub APs are only used for radio frequency forwarding.

Benefits:

Wireless zero roaming

The AC actively collects information about the link quality of various APs in the roaming domain. When it finds an AP with higher signal quality than the current AP, it will appoint the new AP to provide wireless services. No matter how the medical staff walk around the wards, the terminals can actively switch to the optimized link before the medical staff are aware of it.

Extreme small size

With an "ultra-thin" architecture, the indoor AP is thinner, and sub APs can be deployed in scenarios such as wards, nurse stations, and restrooms depending on the building structure. Wi-Fi coverage is good in every part of building. The number of access users in a single room and the access bandwidth of a single user have been greatly improved compared to that of the conventional solution. Besides, this solution is well suitable for applications with high bandwidth requirements such as PACS image retrieval and mobile visit.

Smart O&M

Based on Oasis smart O&M Platform, this solution enables fast fault location, active perception of potential dangers, and intelligent network optimization, which improves O&M efficiency and assists in the work of doctors and nurses.