Cooperative Scheduling for Coexisting Body Area Networks
Abstract
Body area networks (BANs), referring to embedded wireless systems in, on and around bodies, are expected to take an important role for health, leisure, sports and all facets of our daily life. In many situations, several BANs coexist in a small environment, resulting in very strong inter-BAN interference which may seriously disturb communications in these BANs. The goal of this paper is to decrease inter-BAN interference by cooperative scheduling, hence increasing packet reception rate (PRR) of intra-BAN communications. The scheduling issue is divided into two sub-issues: single- BAN scheduling as an optimization issue and multi-BAN concurrent scheduling as a game. For the first sub-issue, horse racing scheduling is proposed, which achieves near-optimal PRR for the scheduling BAN with low complexity. For the second sub-issue, we prove the existence of a set of mixed strategy Nash equilibria (NE) then propose a distributed cooperative scheduling scheme, which efficiently achieves higher PRR than the always existing MSNE without degrading fairness.