A Multicommodity Formulation for Routing in Healthcare Wireless Body Area Networks

In this paper, we propose a minmax multicommodity netflow model for routing in healthcare wireless body area networks (WBAN). The model is aimed at minimizing the worst power consumption of each bio-sensor node placed in the body of a patient plus the total heating costs subject to flow conservation and maximum capacity energy constraints. The model is formulated as a mixed integer linear program (MILP). Thus, we propose a variable neighborhood search (VNS) metaheuristic procedure to come up with tight near optimal solutions. Our preliminary numerical results indicate the VNS approach obtains near optimal solutions with integrality gaps no larger than 3.5 %. Finally, since the proposed model has two conflicting objectives, i.e, heating costs and worst power consumption, we adopt a weighted sum criteria for each objective in order to analyze the behavior of the model.