EMI-aware central processing point deployment for wireless networks in hospitals

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce an approach to jointly minimize energy consumption of wireless transmitters and the harmful interference on sensitive medical devices, and optimize the central controller placement for collecting data from transmitters. More specifically, a multi-objective non-convex mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem is defined and formulated to optimize transmit power of wireless users and central processing point (CPP) deployment along with guaranteeing minimized EMI to comply with the immunity level of medical devices. To solve this problem, an important step is to convexify it. Then we propose the use of a standard branch-and-bound algorithm. Also the program is coded in MATLAB with the help of OPTItoolbox to find the optimal solution. To conduct a numerical result analysis, we considered different cases within a single floor of a hospital and a few scenarios for a two-storey hospital building. Our results show the improvement in throughput and guaranteed immunity for medical devices, when the proposed formulation is deployed along with a branch-and-bound algorithm.