Wireless body area network mobility-aware task offloading scheme

The increasing amount of user equipment (UE) and the rapid advances in wireless body area networks bring revolutionary changes in healthcare systems. However, due to the strict requirements on size, reliability and battery lifetime of UE devices, it is difficult for them to execute latency sensitive or computation intensive tasks effectively. In this paper, we aim to enhance the UE computation capacity by utilizing small size coordinator-based mobile edge computing (C-MEC) servers. In this way, the system complexity, computation resources, and energy consumption are considerably transferred from the UE to the C-MEC, which is a practical approach since C-MEC is power charged, in contrast to the UE. First, the system architecture and the mobility model are presented. Second, several transmission mechanisms are analyzed along with the proposed mobility-aware cooperative task offloading scheme. Numerous selected performance metrics are investigated regarding the number of executed tasks, the percentage of failed tasks, average service time, and the energy consumption of each MEC. The results validate the advantage of task offloading schemes compared with the traditional relay-based technique regarding the number of executed tasks. Moreover, one can obtain that the proposed scheme archives noteworthy benefits, such as low latency and efficiently balance the energy consumption of C-MECs.