Cognitive antenna selection relay for green heterogeneous healthcare networks

This article presents the latest progress on green healthcare research in heterogeneous networks (HetNet), where devices are capable of switching between multiple radio access technologies (RAT) and each RAT operates on a different frequency channel. After outlining the design features and challenges of a medical service paradigm for green cognitive medical body area networks (MBAN), measurements are made to investigate the turn-on characteristics of a power amplifier (PA) in terms of excess energy consumption and turn-on delay. We then present a multi-mode PA architecture for an MBAN relay system. An energy-efficient PA switch/stay mechanism is also presented. This allows the proposed PA architecture to operate given a transmission outage probability and transmission delay constraint. Antenna selection between two heterogeneous RATs is exploited to improve the transmission reliability. Both measurement and numerical results are provided to corroborate the performance of the proposed architecture and its switch/stay mechanism.