Wireless Body Area Networks with varying traffic in epidemic medical emergency situation

Increased population in an area degrades the performance of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) in terms of throughput and packet delivery latency. WBANs by nature do not get fair amount of resources (bandwidth, time and spectrum). In this work, we consider the WBANs with varying traffic load in an area. In order to minimize the computational complexity of the algorithms executed the WBANs, the latter form different groups named Relational Patient Group (RPG), based on the disease types and the syndromes of the patients who are equipped with WBANs. RPG minimizes the computational complexity but does not minimize the traffic load. To minimize the traffic load the WBANs in the RPG form optimal grouping based on the optimal decision making process, named as Virtual Patient Group (VPG). We have formulated the proposed scheme mathematically and evaluated through a series of simulations. Results show that the proposed scheme provides significant improvement in the traffic load and the packet drop probability.