STDAS: Sensing task and data aggregation scheduling for astronaut health monitoring using wireless mesh networks

Astronaut health monitoring (AHM) during long durations of space missions will play a significant role in mission success. Designing networked healthcare systems for aerospace exploration that will enable continual surveillance and timely notification of astronaut health information to terrestrial healthcare providers at minimal deployment and operation cost is an extremely challenging problem. However, such capabilities will enhance the opportunities for remote medical assistance during space missions. In this paper, we extend our task and data aggregation scheduling from single-hop and multi-hop network to mesh network. The algorithm aims to optimize the network performance with respect to response time and network delay. The upper and lower bounds are derived to provide certain guarantee on data delivery time. The performance of a wireless mesh network with 25 sensor nodes is examined by varying network bandwidth and sensing power of sensor nodes. Basic recursive equations for sensing and data reporting are developed for the case of homogeneous and heterogeneous mesh networks and the performance results of two representative data sensing and reporting strategies are presented.