Abstract:
The need for establishing smart hospitals is becoming increasingly evident due to a
number of reasons driven by modern healthcare and technological breakthroughs.
Internet of Things (IoT), Medical Sensors, Low Power Wide Area Network Technol
ogy (LPWAN), Artificial intelligence (AI), Digital technologies, and Reliable Data
Transmission Techniques are used by smart hospitals to improve patient care, opti
mize resource management and streamline hospital operations. In order to handle
the increasing complexity of healthcare delivery, smart hospitals are essential for
various purposes. They improve automation in patient demand, increase oper
ational effectiveness, lower the costs, and increase accessibility to healthcare by
leveraging advanced technologies.
In this dissertation, a suitable licensed LPWAN technology, namely Narrow
band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is chosen as a promising technology for health
care applications since it reduces end to end latency. Due to the interference,
limited bandwidth, and heterogeneity of generated data packets, developing a data
transmission framework that offers differentiated Quality of Services (QoS) to the
critical and non-critical data packets is challenging. The existing literature studies
suffer from insufficient access scheduling considering heterogeneous data packets
and relationship among them in healthcare applications. The first contribution of
i
Abstract
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this thesis is to develop an optimal resource allocation framework for NB-IoT that
maximizes a user’s utility through event prioritization, rate enhancement, and in
terference mitigation. The proposed Priority Aware Utility Maximization (PAUM)
system ensures weighted fair access to resources.
In second contribution, the utilization of Device-to-Device (D2D) communi
cation among Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) devices offers significant
potential for advancing intelligent healthcare systems by extending its superior
data rates, low power consumption. In D2D communication, strategies to miti
gate interference and ensure coexistence with cellular networks are crucial. These
strategies are aimed at enhancing user data rates by optimally allocating spectrum
and managing the transmission power of D2D devices, presenting a complex engi
neering challenge. Existing studies are limited either by the inadequate integration
of NB-IoT D2D communication methods for healthcare, lacking intelligent, dis
tributed, and autonomous decision-making for reliable data transmission, or by in
sufficient healthcare event management policies during resource allocation in smart
healthcare systems. In this work, we introduce an Intelligent Resource Allocation
for Smart Healthcare (iRASH) system, designed to optimize D2D communication
within NB-IoT environments. The iRASH innovatively integrates the Density
based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) and Ant Colony
Optimization (ACO) algorithms to effectively address the unique requirements
of healthcare applications. The proposed system utilizes Belief-Desire-Intention
(BDI) agents for dynamic and intelligent clustering of D2D devices, facilitating
autonomous decision-making and efficient resource allocation. This approach not
only enhances data transmission rates but also reduces power consumption, and
is formulated as a Multi-objective Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem.
Abstract
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Given the NP-hard nature of this problem, iRASH incorporates a polynomial-time
meta-heuristic-based ACO algorithm, which provides a suboptimal solution. This
algorithm adheres to the principles of distributed D2D communication, promoting
equitable resource distribution and substantial improvements in utility, energy effi
ciency, and scalability. Finally, its performances are validated through simulations
on the Network Simulator version 3 (NS-3) platform, demonstrating significant ad
vancements over state-of-the-art solutions in terms of utility, delay, fair resource
distribution, data rate, power efficiency,and system adaptability. As high as im
provements of 65% in utility, 45% in fair sharing of resources, 25% in delay, 15% in
packet delivery ratio observed by PAUM system and 35% in utility cost and 50% in
energy cost are demonstrated by the iRASH system compared to the benchmark,
proving their effectiveness