Power-Aware Fog Supported IoT Network for Healthcare Infrastructure Using Swarm Intelligence-Based Algorithms

Healthcare services become increasingly technology dependent every passing day such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Fog Computing, 5th generation (5G) and beyond communications, etc. They enable the processing and exchange of huge volumes of healthcare data whose integrity and real-time delivery are critical for healthcare services. Optimal power consumption in such essential healthcare infrastructure is critical for the well-being of patients and crucial to reduce the operational cost of healthcare facilities. In this paper, a Fog node has been introduced in an IoT healthcare infrastructure with power consumption as a key deciding factor. This work proposed a mathematical formulation to decide the deployment of two heterogeneous gateways in the healthcare infrastructure. The target of optimization is to minimize transmission power and infrastructure costs. Two swarm intelligence-based algorithms have been used to solve the computationally challenging optimization problem. These evolutionary algorithms are a discrete fireworks algorithm and a discrete artificial bee colony algorithm with an ensemble of local search methods. Their performance is compared against the genetic algorithm. The simulation results demonstrate a saving of up to 33 percent in power consumption in the proposed healthcare infrastructure that can significantly improve healthcare data communications and its operational costs.