A game theory control scheme in medium access for Wireless Body Area Network

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has been considered for applications in medical, healthcare and sports fields. Although there are several protocols for wireless personal area networks, specific features and reliability requirements in WBAN bring new challenges in protocol design. An appropriate control scheme in the MAC layer can make a significant improvement in network performance. Based on traffic priority and prior knowledge this paper proposes a game theoretical framework to smartly control access in contention period and contention free period as defined in IEEE 802.15.6 standard. The coordinator controls access probability of contention period based on users´ priority in CSMA/CA and allocates suitable slots with strategies for best payoff based on link states in guaranteed time slots (GTS). The simulation results show the improved performance especially in heavily loaded channel condition when the optimal control mode is applied.