Buffer-aware and QoS-effective resource allocation scheme in WBANs

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) represents one of the most promising networks to provide health applications for improving the quality of life, such as ubiquitous e-Health services and real-time health monitoring. The resource allocation of an energy-constrained, heterogeneous WBAN is a critical issue that should consider both energy efficiency and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements with the dynamic link characteristics, especially when the limited resource cannot satisfy the expected QoS requirements. In this paper, a buffer aware Energy-efficient and QoS-effective resource allocation scheme is proposed in which the sensor queue buffer states, constraints of QoS metrics and the characteristics of dynamic links are considered. Specifically, a buffer aware sensor evaluation method is designed to dynamically evaluate the sensor state with considering the sensor buffer states for improving the system performance. We then formulate the resource allocation problem for optimizing the transmission power, the transmission rate and the allocated time slots for each sensor to minimize the sum mix-cost, which is defined to characterize the energy cost and QoS cost between attainable QoS support and QoS requirements. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the buffer aware sensor evaluation method and the proposed energy-efficient and QoS-effective resource allocation scheme.