A Game Theoretic Approach for Inter-Network Interference Mitigation in Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is an emerging technology to provide real-time health monitoring and ubiquitous healthcare services. In many applications, multiple wireless body area networks have to coexist in a small area, resulting in serious inter-network interference. This not only reduces network reliability that is especially important in emergency medical applications, but also consumes more power of WBANs. In this paper, an inter-network interference mitigation approach based on a power control algorithm is proposed. Power control is modeled as a non-cooperative game, in which both inter-network interference and energy efficiency of WBANs are considered. The existence and uniqueness of Nash Equilibrium in the game are proved, and an optimal scheme based on best response is proposed to find its Nash Equilibrium. By coordinating the transmission power levels among networks under interference environment, the total system throughput can be increased with minimum power consumed. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been illustrated by simulation results, where the performance of the proposed approach is evaluated in terms of overall utility and power efficiency and convergence speed.