Cooperative Design of Two Level Fuzzy Logic Controllers for Medium Access Control in Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) consists of various sensors which are attached on or even implanted in the body to improve health care and the quality of life. Soft computing techniques including fuzzy logic have been successfully applied to WBANs. However, most of the existing research works considered only single-level fuzzy logic controls (FLCs). In this paper, we propose a two-level control scheme at both the sensor level and the coordinator level to improve both the reliability and performance of Medium Access Controls (MAC) in WBANs. We also propose to use Cooperative PSO (CPSO) to automate the design of our two-level control scheme. With the goal of improving network reliability while keeping the communication delay at a low level, we have particularly experimented on four different collaborator selection methods for CPSO. Specifically, we show that network knowledge can help CPSO to select collaborators more effectively. Moreover, the FLCs designed by our approach is also shown to outperform some recently developed algorithms and the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.