Application of Kuramoto Model to Transmission Power Control in Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) exhibits immense potential for application in ubiquitous healthcare systems. However, in dense environments where multiple WBANs are deployed such as hospitals, the performance of WBANs is deteriorated by inter-network interference. In this study, we apply Kuramoto model to the transmission power control of users in WBAN environments with the purpose of addressing the issue of inter-network interference, and thereby improving the Quality of Service (QoS) fairness in WBAN environment. For this purpose, we define the utility function which expresses the QoS of a user and synchronize this utility function value of each user for fair resource allocation. The synchronization of the utility function is obtained by Kuramoto model and coupling coefficient defined in Kuramoto model is dynamically adjusted for faster convergence. The range of convergence of the Kuramoto model is derived analytically. From the simulation results, we can verify that the performance of the proposed algorithm is better than those of the existing algorithms with regard to QoS fairness, power, and data rate. In addition, we show that the convergence speed of the proposed algorithm with adaptive coupling strength parameter outperforms the Kuramoto model with fixed coupling strength parameter.