The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has increased research outputs in telemedicine over the last couple of years. One solution to the COVID-19 pandemic as revealed in literature is to leverage telemedicine for accessing health care remotely. In this survey paper, we review several articles on eHealth and Telemedicine with emphasis on the articles’ focus area, including wireless technologies and architectures in eHealth, communications protocols, Quality of Service, and Experience Standards, among other considerations. In addition, we provide an overview of telemedicine for new readers. This survey reviews several telecommunications technologies currently being proposed along with their standards and challenges. In general, an encompassing survey on the developments in telemedicine technology, standards, and protocols is presented while acquainting researchers with several open issues. Special mention of the state-of-the-art specialist application areas are presented. We conclude the survey paper by presenting important research challenges and potential future directions as they pertain to telemedicine technology.

The ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic have contributed in part to a recent upsurge in the study and development of eHealth systems. Although it is almost impossible to cover all aspects of eHealth in a single discussion, three critical areas have gained traction. These include the need for acceptable eHealth architectures, the development of mobile health (mHealth) technologies, and the need to address eHealth system security concerns. Existing survey articles lack a synthesis of the most recent advancements in the development of architectures, mHealth solutions, and innovative security measures, which are essential components of effective eHealth systems. Consequently, the present article aims at providing an encompassing survey of these three aspects towards the development of successful and efficient eHealth systems. Firstly, we discuss the most recent innovations in eHealth architectures, such as blockchain-, Internet of Things (IoT)-, and cloud-based architectures, focusing on their respective benefits and drawbacks while also providing an overview of how they might be implemented and used. Concerning mHealth and security, we focus on key developments in both areas while discussing other critical topics of importance for eHealth systems. We close with a discussion of the important research challenges and potential future directions as they pertain to architecture, mHealth, and security concerns. This survey gives a comprehensive overview, including the merits and limitations of several possible technologies for the development of eHealth systems. This endeavor offers researchers and developers a quick snapshot of the information necessary during the design and decision-making phases of the eHealth system development lifecycle. Furthermore, we conclude that building a unified architecture for eHealth systems would require combining several existing designs. It also points out that there are still a number of problems to be solved, so more research and investment are needed to develop and deploy functional eHealth systems.

The improvement of system accuracy is a key issue in the detection and classification of tumors in digital mammographic images. This affects how radiologists make accurate analysis in the diagnosis of breast cancer. The goal of this research is to use augmentation techniques to improve system classification accuracy on a large number of datasets. A popular deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) architecture known as AlexNet was modified and used to categorize mammography images into two classes of benign (normal) and malignant (abnormal) tumors. The results demonstrated an overall system accuracy of 95.70%. It indicates an improved performance over traditional approaches in breast cancer diagnosis.

Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) is widely considered in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) for use in intelligent transportation systems. In particular, the pervasive deployment of different sensors in modern vehicles has unlocked interesting possibilities for improving routing performance in VANETs. Nevertheless, the discovery of short single loop-free routes for effective and efficient information dissemination in VANETs remains a challenge. This challenge proves more difficult to solve since it reduces to the case of finding the shortest Hamiltonian path for effective routing in VANETs. Consequently, in this paper, we propose two discretized variants of the cuckoo search optimization (CSO) algorithm, namely, the Lévy flight-based discrete CSO (LF-DCSO) and the random walk-based discrete CSO (RW-DCSO) for effective route discovery in VANETs. In addition, we investigated the inverse mutation operator gleaned from genetic algorithm (GA) in order to improve the exploration properties of our DCSO variants. We describe a new objective function that effectively models the reliability of individual links between nodes that comprise a single route. A detailed report of the routing protocol that controls the routing process is presented. Our proposed methods were compared against the roulette wheel-based GA and the improved k-means-based GA termed IGAROT. Specifically, our findings reveal that there was no significant difference in the performance of the different methods in the low vehicle density scenario, however, in the medium vehicle density scenario, the RW-DCSO algorithm achieved 2.56%, 100%, and 128.57% percentage increment in its route reliability score over the LF-DCSO, RW-GA, and IGAROT algorithms, respectively. Whereas in the high vehicle density scenario, the LF-DCSO algorithm achieved a percentage increment of 42.85%, 525%, and 733.33% in the route reliability score obtained over the RW-DCSO, IGAROT, and RW-GA algorithms, respectively. Such results suggest that our methods are able to guarantee effective routing in VANETs.

Soft frequency reuse (SFR) has been proposed as a technique to address the problem of intercell interference (ICI) in cellular networks. A major challenge facing SFR implementation is the efficient allocation of scarce base station (BS) resources like bandwidth and power. This challenge further motivates the need for accurate network modelling, a requirement for optimal SFR algorithms. Particularly, the modelling and optimization of SFR in complex Heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets) is a current problem in academia and the industry. In this paper, we present a new interference model for HetNets which considers the probabilistic nature of ICI in SFR. The interference probabilities from different BS tiers to the various user (UE) classes are computed. In combination with the analysis of macro BS transmit powers and distance relationships, new equations are also derived for UE signal-to-interference-ratio (SINR) and capacity. A detailed performance analysis is then presented for cases of both Hexagonal and Irregular macro BS placements. Our results show how macro and pico UE perform with respect to the BS power ratios, edge frequencies and placement of BS. This provides useful insights into the development of optimal SFR techniques for HetNets.