Efficient multiple personal wireless hub assignment in next generation healthcare facilities

Abstract

Low power wireless sensors, personal wireless hub (PWH) and receivers can reduce the workload of the paramedic staff in a hospital. In this paper, we use multiple PWHs to transfer sensor data to the main central controller, which helps the wireless sensor devices. A well designed multiple PWH assignment and power control scheme can reduce the electromagnetic and in-band interference induced to the other medical devices in the hospital. We propose a framework and low complexity algorithm for interference aware joint power control and multiple PWH assignment (IAJPCPA) in a hospital building with cognitive radio capability. The proposed IAJPCPA is a non-convex mixed integer non-linear optimization problem (NC-MINLP) which is generally NP-hard. We present an efficient PWH assignment and power control scheme for IAJPCPA. We also propose an upper bound on the IAJPCPA that converts the non-convex problem into a convex optimization problem. We examine the effect of different system parameters.