An Individual Differentiated Coexisting Mechanism for Multiple Wireless Body Area Networks Based on Game Theory

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is an emerging technology that has enormous potential to be implemented in medical applications. However, the performance of WBANs can be severely degraded by concomitant inter-WBAN interference in some specific environments, where the multiple WBANs are densely deployed, e.g., hospitals and senior citizen communities. In this paper, a novel coexisting mechanism is proposed to deal with the multi-WBANs coexisting which can provide differentiated communication QoS for different WBANs according to their own priority conditions. The proposed mechanism consists of four parts which are time slot allocation, access control, active part interleaving, and power control. Specifically, the time slot allocation is designed based on the game theory. Access control and Active period scheduling are designed referring to the coexisting methods specified in IEEE 802.15.6 standard. In addition, the power control utilizes mobility prediction to adjust transmitting power for each coexisting WBAN. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism is stable and convergent in varying coexisting scenarios and can realize differentiated time slot allocation depending on WBANs' priority conditions. Furthermore, when compared with the original mechanisms specified in IEEE 802.15.6, transmission performance of coexisting WBANs is improved in terms of transmission outage probability, transmission energy efficiency, and overall throughput.