Asynchronous flow scheduling for green ambient assisted living communications

AAL applications that support users (in particular, the elderly and patients) in staying at home are increasingly becoming popular in health care systems. Basically, these AAL applications provide personal information through location-aware, data-aware, and context-aware heterogeneous devices such as sensors and actuators. Obviously, due to this heterogeneity, it is very important to study the asynchronous flow scheduling problem. This article designs a simple but efficient asynchronous flow scheduling scheme aiming to sense, predict, and realize AAL applications. Specifically, the scheduling architecture is developed by analyzing various device characteristics and user activities, and the corresponding applications are classified from user needs aspects. Subsequently, we propose asynchronous flow scheduling taking into account energy efficiency and implementation simplicity. Detailed discussions of the proposed system and possible future research directions are provided.