Cost-Effective Mapping between Wireless Body Area Networks and Cloud Service Providers Based on Multi-Stage Bargaining

This paper presents a bargaining-based resource allocation and price agreement in an environment of cloud-assisted Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). The challenge is to finalize a price agreement between the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and the WBANs, followed by a cost-effective mapping among them. Existing solutions primarily focus on profits of the CSPs, while guaranteeing different user satisfaction levels. Such pricing schemes are bias prone, as quantifying user satisfaction is fuzzy in nature and hard to implement. Moreover, such an traditional approach may lead to an unregulated market, where few service providers enjoy the monopoly/oligopoly situation. However, in this work, we try to remove such biasness from the pricing agreements, and envision this challenge from a comparatively fair point of view. In order to do so, we use the concept of bargaining, an interesting approach involving cooperative game theory. We introduce an exposition - multi-stage Nash bargaining solution (MUST-NBS), that unfolds into multiple stages of bargaining, as the name suggests, until we conclude price agreement between the CSPs and the WBANs. In addition, the proposed approach also consummates the final mapping between the CSPs and the WBANs, depending on the cost-effectiveness of the WBANs. Analysis of the proposed algorithms and the inferences of the results validates the usefulness of the proposed mapping technique.