Guidelines for designing wireless communications for rural telemedicine in developing countries include:

• Data gathering: Collect general population demographic data and geography of the deployment area, including terrain elevation and environmental features.
• Establishing required applications: Identify communications technology that is low-cost, robust, readily available, and easy to operate and maintain.
• Choosing technology: Optimize the quality/cost relation; a wireless WAN is usually the best option.
• Designing physical infrastructure: Conduct extensive radio frequency studies to assess noise and interference.
• Simulation analysis: Perform extensive simulation analysis of the expected network traffic.