Wireless Resource Allocation in Next Generation Healthcare Facilities

Healthcare facilities with intelligent wireless devices can reduce the workload of the paramedic staff. These devices include low-power wireless sensors, personal wireless hub (PWH), and receivers. The PWH can act as a relay in the hospital network. To help the wireless sensor devices, we use multiple PWHs to transfer sensor data to the main central controller. The use of multiple PWHs can increase the performance of the wireless network in the hospital. It also adds reliability to the coverage of the wireless network. In this paper, 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. In the proposed framework, any wireless sensor device can send and receive data from multiple PWHs. The proposed IAJPCPA is a nonconvex mixed integer nonlinear optimization problem, which is generally NP-hard. The main objective of IAJPCPA is to maximize the total transmission data rate by assigning PWHs to the wireless sensor devices under the constraint of acceptable interference to the licensed wireless devices. To this end, we present an efficient PWH assignment and power control scheme for IAJPCPA problem by employing an upper bound on the IAJPCPA that converts the nonconvex problem into a convex optimization problem. Finally, we examine the effect of different system parameters on the performance of the proposed algorithm.