Central Processing Point Deployment for e-Healthcare Services Using Wireless Networks

In this paper, we present an approach to jointly minimize energy consumption of wireless transmitters and harmful interference on sensitive medical devices, and optimize the central controller placement for collecting data from transmitters. In particular, a multiobjective nonconvex mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem is formulated to optimize transmit power of wireless users and central processing point deployment along with guaranteeing minimized electromagnetic interference to comply with the immunity level of medical devices. To solve this problem, an important step is to convexify it, following which, we propose the use of a standard branch-and-bound algorithm to solve it. The solution is implemented in MATLAB using optimization interface Toolbox. We analyze the results numerically and consider different cases within a single floor of a hospital and a few scenarios for a two-storey hospital building. Our results show that the proposed approach offers improvement in throughput and guaranteed immunity for medical devices.