Cooperative Scheduling for Coexisting Body Area Networks

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 the facets of our daily life. In many cases, several BANs coexist in a small area, resulting in very strong inter-BAN interference, which seriously disturbs intra-BAN communications. The goal of this paper is to decrease inter-BAN interference by cooperative scheduling, hence increasing packet reception rate (PRR) of intra-BAN communications. Cooperative scheduling here is divided into two sub-problems: single-BAN scheduling as an assignment problem and multi-BAN concurrent scheduling as a game. For the first sub-problem, a low complexity algorithm, horse racing scheduling, is proposed, which achieves near-optimal PRR for the BAN performing scheduling. For the second sub-problem, we prove the existence of a set of mixed strategy Nash equilibria (MSNE). Then, we propose a distributed cooperative scheduling scheme, which efficiently achieves higher PRR than the MSNE without degrading fairness.