DynAHeal: Dynamic energy efficient task assignment for wireless healthcare systems

Energy consumption is a critical parameter in wireless healthcare systems which consist of battery operated devices such as sensors and local aggregators. The system battery lifetime depends on the allocation of processing, sensing, and communication tasks to devices of the system. In this paper, we optimize the battery life of a wireless healthcare system by efficiently assigning tasks to the available resources. There are several dynamically changing characteristics in the system, such as task parameters (processing complexity, arrival rate, and output data), each device's available battery capacity, varying wireless channel conditions, and network load. Our dynamic task assignment algorithm, ¿DynAHeal¿ adapts to such changing conditions, and improves the battery life. Our experiments show that the task assignment given by DynAHeal improves the overall system lifetime under varying dynamic conditions on an average 60% relative to sending all the data for processing to the base station, and 35% with respect to an optimal static design time assignment.