Towards Differentiated Rate Control for Congestion and Hotspot Avoidance in Implantable Wireless Body Area Networks

Implantable wireless body area networks (WBANs) are gaining considerable attention to the researchers due to their high potential in healthcare applications. However, one of the biggest challenges of WBANs is the heat produced by wireless implants because of the continuous sensing of physiological parameters that could cause thermal impairment to the human tissue. Again, an implantable WBAN can be equipped with heterogeneous nodes having diverse throughput, fidelity, and latency demands. Also, un-controlled traffic reporting rate could cause high contention as well as congestion in nodes, which are usually organized forming a many-to-one routing paradigm in a WBAN. The problem of congestion not only restrains in satisfying the desired QoS requirements of the diverse healthcare applications, but also increases the dissipated energy and the temperature of an implant biosensor. This paper proposes a novel rate control mechanism with the aim of providing a unified solution for both congestion and hotspot avoidance in an implantable WBAN. The proposed scheme also presents a scheduling rate allocation mechanism reflecting the relative priority of biosensors. The performance of the protocol is evaluated using simulations, which demonstrate that the proposed protocol maintains lower temperature rise as well as avoid the creation of hotspot(s). The results also indicate that the proposed protocol significantly improves the performance of healthcare applications in terms of throughput, reliability, latency, as well as energy consumption.