Distributed in-network processing and resource optimization over mobile-health systems

Advances in wireless and mobile communication technologies has promoted the development of Mobile-health (m-health) systems to find new ways to acquire, process, transport, and secure the medical data. M-health systems provide the scalability needed to cope with the increasing number of elderly and chronic disease patients requiring constant monitoring. However, the design and operation of such systems with Body Area Sensor Networks (BASNs) is challenging in twofold. First, limited energy, computational and storage resources of the sensor nodes. Second, the need to guarantee application level Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, we integrate wireless network components, and application-layer characteristics to provide sustainable, energy-efficient and high-quality services for m-health systems. In particular, we propose an Energy-Cost-Distortion solution, which exploits the benefits of in-network processing and medical data adaptation to optimize the transmission energy consumption and the cost of using network services. Moreover, we present a distributed cross-layer solution, which is suitable for heterogeneous wireless m-health systems with variable network size. Our scheme leverages Lagrangian duality theory to find efficient trade-off among energy consumption, network cost, and vital signs distortion, for delay sensitive transmission of medical data. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves the optimal trade-off between energy efficiency and QoS requirements, while providing 15% savings in the objective function (i.e., energy-cost-distortion utility function), compared to solutions based on equal bandwidth allocation.