Cost-Driven Handover and Service Migration in Healthcare 4.0 Networks

Abstract—Healthcare 4.0 (H4.0) leverages sixth-generation (6G) communications, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) to enable real-time healthcare services. Future H4.0 deployments will rely on integrated Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks (TN-NTNs), where user mobility and frequent handovers can lead to service disruptions, traffic rerouting, xNF migrations, and increased operational costs, thereby undermining stringent QoS requirements of missioncritical applications. To address these challenges, this paper proposes HEAL, a low-complexity and cost-driven joint handover and service migration framework for 6G-H4.0 networks. HEAL jointly optimizes user association, traffic routing, and any-type Network Function (xNF) placement under mobility constraints for healthcare-oriented Service Function Chains (SFCs), in compliance with ITU-R IMT-2030 requirements. The problem is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) that minimizes total operational expenditure (OPEX) while reducing mobility events and satisfying healthcare QoS constraints. Simulation results show that HEAL reduces execution time by approximately 84% compared to the optimal MILP solution. Moreover, it achieves up to 82% lower OPEX than the stateof- the-art benchmark, while maintaining OPEX within approximately 18% of the optimal solution, demonstrating its suitability for scalable and cost-efficient 6G-H4.0 deployments.