Cellular-Assisted Device-to-Device Communications for Healthcare Monitoring Wireless Body Area Networks

We envisage each person will wear an individual wireless body area network (WBAN) for healthcare monitoring. Two WBANs in proximity may collide. Such WBAN collisions can significantly degrade communication quality of service (QoS), in terms of throughput and latency of healthcare applications. To avoid collisions, we propose to use cellular-assisted device-to-device (D2D) communications to connect on-body sensors to a hub within WBAN. These D2D transmissions are performed concurrently with cellular transmissions and thus, interference is imposed on each other. A radio resource allocation scheme has been developed to manage the interference. The scheme uses a combination of difference of convex optimization and Hungarian algorithm to control transmit power and to assign communication channel to both cellular and D2D transmissions. The objective is to maximize the sum of cellular throughput while avoiding collisions among co-located WBANs and satisfying QoS requirements of healthcare applications. Evaluation results confirm that WBAN collisions can be avoided at a crowded pedestrian walkway, even when there are as many as 6 pedestrian arrivals per second.