QoS-driven power control for inter-WBAN interference mitigation

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are usually designed for pervasive healthcare applications. Since the primary traffic in WBAN is vital physiological signals, guaranteeing the Quality of Service (QoS) is crucial while designing WBAN. However, QoS of WBAN will be degraded in strong inter-WBAN interference environment such as hospitals and senior communities, where WBANs are densely deployed. In this paper, by focusing on a more practical WBAN model, we propose a non- cooperative power control game to mitigate inter- WBAN interference, in which the cost function is well designed by considering both QoS requirement and energy constraint. The existence of at least one Nash equilibrium (NE) point for the game is proved and a sufficient condition for the uniqueness of the NE is derived. To guarantee non-cooperative among WBANs, an interference segmentation estimate (ISE) algorithm is proposed to obtain an approximation of the NE point. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ISE algorithm.