Efficient multiple personal wireless hub assignment in next generation healthcare facilities

Low power wireless sensors, personal wireless hub (PWH) and receivers can reduce the workload of the paramedic staff in a hospital. In this paper, we use multiple PWHs to transfer sensor data to the main central controller, which helps the wireless sensor devices. A well designed multiple PWH assignment and power control scheme can reduce the electromagnetic and in-band interference induced to the other medical devices in the hospital. 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. The proposed IAJPCPA is a non-convex mixed integer non-linear optimization problem (NC-MINLP) which is generally NP-hard. We present an efficient PWH assignment and power control scheme for IAJPCPA. We also propose an upper bound on the IAJPCPA that converts the non-convex problem into a convex optimization problem. We examine the effect of different system parameters.