Cooperative remote video consultation on demand for e-patients

With the advent of high-speed internet band-width consuming video conferencing applications will rapidly become attractive to e-patients seeking real-time video consultations from e-doctors. In a conventional system patients connect to a known server in a medical center of his choice. If the server (i.e. a server via which a medical consultant communicates with a patient) is busy, the patient must wait before the server becomes free. Such a system is not efficient as many patients in medical centers with busy servers may either have to wait long, or are simply turned away. Patients may also leave when they become impatient. Not only the patients suffer due to server unavailability, medical service providers also incur revenue losses due to lost patients. To counter these problems, we propose a distributed cooperative Video Consultation on Demand (VCoD) system where servers are located in many different medical centers in different neighbourhoods close to patient concentrations. In such a cooperative system if patients find their nearby servers under heavy load they are automatically directed to servers that are least loaded by using efficient server selection method (also called anycasting). Simple numerical analysis shows that this not only maximizes revenues for medical service providers by reducing number of lost patients, but also improves average response time for e-patients.