Throughput optimization with fairness consideration for coexisting WBANs

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a kind of network placed around human body and provides continuous monitoring of physical signals for e-health application. When a bunch of WBANs group together in a small area, the strong inter-BAN interference causes severe influence to the intra-BAN communication. In this paper, we investigate the throughput-maximizing strategy concerning that case. Firstly, a throughput optimization problem with fairness consideration is formulated based on the interference model, which is shown to be a non-linear integer programming problem. Then, we propose an algorithm named Fairness-based Throughput Maximization Heuristic (FTMH) to obtain a suboptimal solution but with low complexity. Compared with Horse Racing algorithm, FTMH achieves higher throughput, better energy efficiency while greatly improves the fairness performance among different WBANs.