GATE, a game theory approach on traffic volume aware channel width adaptation for WBAN medical applications

Abstract

SummaryTraditional single channel communication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) offers limited network throughput due to frequent interferences and congestion caused by concurrent transmissions in the same neighborhood. On the one hand, successful packet delivery requires mostly multiple retransmissions because of frequent collisions which also uses much battery. On the other hand, concurrent transmissions over multiple channels not only offer better network throughput and delays, but also reduce power consumption as packet collisions are minimized or eliminated depending upon the efficiency of the concerned channel assignment scheme. This may ensure QoS requirements of transmissions demanding high bandwidth and those that are delay sensitive such as in the case of wireless body area networks. In this paper, we consider a multiple channel wireless body area networks and propose GATE, a theoretical game approach to adapt the channel bandwidth to the volume traffic requirement. In this way, medical video and audio traffics which are likely to be much bandwidth consumer are mainly considered using their priority classes. The simulation results show good performances of the proposed system in terms of increasing throughput and significantly reducing delay and energy consumption.