Novel efficient and secure medical data transmission on WiMAX

This paper discusses an improved technique for bandwidth-efficient and secure transmission of medical records over simulated orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX)/IEEE 802.16 physical layer. Medical data compaction along with security has been achieved by embedding electrocardiogram (ECG) data into Haar wavelet coefficients of an x-ray image that is transmitted over the channel. The compaction ratio and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) between the transmitted and received x-ray images for visual clinical performance have been evaluated. It is shown that 12.5% data compaction along with true reception of ECG signal can be achieved for channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) >or= 9.6 dB while the achieved PSNR was 55.97 dB. The PSNR value is well above the minimum acceptable 35 dB level, making it potentially useful for secure and bandwidth-efficient transmission of clinical records.