A Self-Adjustable Rate Control in Wireless Body Area Networks

The convergent feature of traffic in wireless body area networks (WBANs) makes congestion in certain areas which are the place of events and/or the location of sensor nodes near a sink. Congestion brings packet loss, retransmission, and delay at the node and it also causes the consumption of additional energy. Therefore there is no doubt that congestion needs to be controlled efficiently. In this paper, we suggest a self-adjustable rate control in WBANs. Our scheme performs rate control dynamically each node based on a predication model which uses rate function including congestion risk degree and valuation function, without requiring congestion detection and congestion notification steps. We carry out the operation of our scheme and have demonstrated our rate control to be efficient. We also show that the negative effects from network congestion can be greatly mitigated as compared with a no rate control mechanism.