Abstract
Healthcare is a very important sector in every nation's life. During the last few years, the healthcare industry was developed rapidly affected by the advances in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT). ICT is facilitating converged healthcare systems which will allow the healthcare stakeholders to seamlessly organize their activities, provide personalized and preventive healthcare to citizens, and improve systems and operational efficiencies. Indeed, with the emerging concepts of urban developments such as smart cities, a coordinated healthcare approach can manage health for the whole society at city, country, or global levels. However, future healthcare systems will require more computations and reliable communications. Mobile computing will play essential role in future healthcare systems as the mobile devices will provide an interface between the patients and the healthcare professionals and organizations. However, limited battery lifetime, limited processing capabilities, and limited storage capacities limit the benefits that mobile computing can bring to healthcare and other sectors. The concept of Cloud Computing relies on a network-based resource sharing to increase resource availability and reduce the cost. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is an emerging technology that converges mobile computing and cloud computing to overcome limitations of mobile devices as the processing and storage for intensive jobs are transferred to take place at the cloud, and the final results are returned back to the mobile device. However, traditional MCC designs has its own challenges including high latency and large transmission power consumption when accessing compute and storage resources over the network. The cloudlet concept that will be discussed in this work is believed to overcome some of these MCC limitations. In this proposal, we investigate the feasibility and requirements of future healthcare infrastructure for Saudi Arabia. For this purpose, a study to explore the development of the healthcare systems over the last decades along with the developments of the ICT technology is conducted. Moreover, we indicate the motivations for future converged mobile cloud-based healthcare systems in KSA and the associated challenges. We also introduce a layered design for future healthcare systems in KSA. Another main contribution of this research is proposing an efficient Hybrid cloudlet-based mobile cloud computing model to be used in healthcare systems-cloudlet layer. The proposed Hybrid MCC model is simulated using MCCSim tool with changing wide set of simulation parameters. The obtained results for the time delay and consumed power show that the proposed model overcomes previously proposed MCC models.