Distributed Pricing Policy for Cloud-Assisted Body-to-Body Networks with Optimal QoS and Energy Considerations

Abstract

Cloud-Assisted Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is one of the key emerging technology for medical applications in the era of Internet-of-Things. In cloud-assisted WBANs, the WBANs are able to access the cloud resources, which are geographically close to the local Access Points (APs). However, in the presence of poor radio link-quality between cloud-assisted WBANs and APs, energy consumption and service delay of the network dynamically changed. Therefore, in order to solve this problem, we propose an energy-efficient Body-to-Body (B2B) communications among coexisting WBANs to relay the information of the patients to nearest APs to provide real-time healthcare services. On the other hand, the healthcare services enabled for cloud-assisted WBANs is popularly known as Healthcare-as-a-Service (He-aaS). In He-aaS, it is very challenging to finalize a price agreement between WBANs and Health-Cloud Service Providers (H-CSPs) as WBANs follow a heterogeneous architecture. The existing pricing mechanisms, which are constrained to the homogeneous applications, are not compatible to He-aaS. We propose an optimal and distributed pricing policy for He-aaS in order to increase the profit level of each WBAN with the consideration of the optimal QoS and energy. Analysis of the proposed algorithms and the inferences of the results validates the usefulness of the proposed energy-efficient B2B communication and distributed pricing policy. Extensive results indicate that our proposed schemes are able to efficiently utilize limited resource with optimal QoS and energy consideration.