Dynamic Connectivity Establishment and Cooperative Scheduling for QoS-Aware Wireless Body Area Networks

In a hospital environment, the total number of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) equipped patients requesting ubiquitous healthcare services in an area increases significantly. Therefore, increased traffic load and group-based mobility of WBANs degrades the performance of each WBAN significantly, concerning service delay and network throughput. In addition, the mobility of WBANs affects connectivity between a WBAN and an Access Point (AP) dynamically, which affects the variation in link quality significantly. To address the connectivity problem and provide Quality of Services (QoS) in the network, we propose a dynamic connectivity establishment and cooperative scheduling scheme, which minimizes the packet delivery delay and maximizes the network throughput. First, to secure the reliable connectivity among WBANs and APs dynamically, we formulate a selection parameter using a price-based approach. Thereafter, we formulate a utility function for the WBANs to offer QoS using a coalition game-theoretic approach. We study the performance of the proposed approach holistically, based on different network parameters. We also compare the performance of the proposed scheme with the existing state-of-the-art.