Distributed cross-layer optimization for healthcare monitoring applications

Mobile Health (mHealth) systems leverage wireless and mobile communication technologies to provide healthcare stakeholders with innovative tools and solutions that can revolutionize healthcare provisioning. Body Area Sensor Networks (BASNs) is part of the mHealth system that focuses on the acquisition by a group of biomedical sensors of vital signals. However, the design and operation of BASNs are challenging, because of the limited power and small form factor of biomedical sensors. The source encoding and data transmission are the two dominant power-consuming operations in wireless monitoring system. Therefore, in this paper, a cross-layer framework that aims at minimizing the total energy consumption subject to delay and distortion constraints is proposed. The optimal encoding and transmission energy are computed to minimize the energy consumption in a delay constrained wireless BASN. This cross-layer framework is proposed, across Application-MAC-Physical layers. At large scale networks and due to heterogeneity of wireless BASNs, centralized cross-layer optimization becomes less efficient and more complex. Therefore, a distributed cross-layer optimization has been considered in this paper. The proposed solution has close-to-optimal performance with lower complexity. Simulation results show that the distributed scheme achieves the compromise between complexity and efficiency in energy consumption compared to centralized scheme.