Priority-Aware Cooperative Data Uploading in Body-to-Body Networks for Healthcare IoT

The body-to-body network (BBN), which enables a group of wireless body area network (WBAN) users to collaborate and share their individual network resources, has emerged as a promised technology for the Internet of Things (IoT)-based healthcare system. In BBN, WBAN users with good Internet connectivity act as gateway users and help their nearby WBAN users with poor Internet connectivity to upload their physiological data in exchange for incentives. The WBAN users are heterogeneous in terms of their data priority, which depends on the criticality of medical data and require varying uplink transmission rates for uploading. Designing an incentive mechanism for such a scenario is very challenging because the data priority is a private information to the WBAN user. In this work, we propose an incentive scheme based on contract theory, to model the economic interaction between the gateway and requesting WBAN users and ensure priority-aware data uploading in BBN. First, the requesting WBAN users are categorized into different types based on their data priority. Thereafter, we formulate a contract design problem to maximize the payoff of gateway WBAN user while satisfying the requirements of requesting users. The gateway WBAN user offers a contract to requesting users and each requesting user selects it based on its type. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism improves the payoffs of both the gateway and requesting WBAN users.