A Game Theoretic Approach for Inter-Network Interference Mitigation in Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Network(WBAN) is an emerging technology to provide real-time health monitoring and ubiquitous healthcare services. In many applications, multiple wireless body area networks have to coexist in a small area, resulting in serious inter-network interference. This not only reduces network reliability that is especially important in emergency medical applications, but also consumes more power of WBANs. In this paper, an inter-network interference mitigation approach based on a power control algorithm is proposed. Power control is modeled as a non-cooperative game, in which both inter-network interference and energy efficiency of WBANs are considered. The existence and uniqueness of Nash Equilibrium in the game are proved, and an optimal scheme based on best response is proposed to find its Nash Equilibrium. By coordinating the transmission power levels among networks under interference environment, the total system throughput can be increased with minimum power consumed. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been illustrated by simulation results, where the performance of the proposed approach is evaluated in terms of overall utility and power efficiency and convergence speed.

A new protocol for concurrently allocating licensed spectrum to underlay cognitive users

Cognitive radio technology makes efficient use of the valuable radio frequency spectrum in a non-interfering manner to solve the problem of spectrum scarcity. This paper aims to design a scheme for the concurrent use of licensed frequencies by Underlay Cognitive Users （UCUs）. We develop a new receiver-initiated Medium Access Control （MAC） protocol to facilitate the selections of alternative reliable carrier frequencies. A circuit is designed to establish reliable carrier selections based on the Received Signal Strength Indicator （RSSI） at the receiving end. Based on both packet-level simulations and various performance parameters, a comparison is carried out among conventional techniques, including the Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance （MACA） and MACA by invitation（MACA-BI） techniques, and our scheme. The simulated results demonstrate that when conventional techniques are used, the system overhead time increases from 0.5 s on the first attempt to 16.5 s on the sixth attempt. In the proposed scheme under the same failure condition, overhead time varies from 0.5 s to 2 s. This improvement is due to the complete elimination of the exponential waiting time that occurs during failed transmissions. An average efficiency of 60% is achieved with our scheme while only 43% and 34% average efficiencies are achieved with the MACA and MACA-BI techniques, respectively. The throughput performance of our scheme on the fourth attempt is 7 Mbps, whereas for the MACA and MACA-BI protocols, it is 1.9 Mbps and 2.2 Mbps respectively.

QoE based power control scheme for interference mitigation in high-density WLANs

Mobile data traffic is going through an explosive growth recently as mobile smart devices become more and more ubiquitous, causing huge pressure on cellular network. Taking advantage of its low cost and easy-to-deploy feature, wireless local-area networks（WLAN） becomes increasingly popular to offload data streams from cellular network, followed by higher and higher density of its deployment. However, the high density of WLAN will cause more interference, which results in degradation of its performance. Therefore, in order to enhance the performance of the network, we aim to minimize the interference caused by high density of WLAN. In this paper, we propose a novel power control scheme to achieve the above aim. We use the quality of experience（QoE） evaluation to coordinate the power of each access point（AP） and finally realize the optimization of the entire network. According to the simulation results, our scheme improves the performance of the network significantly in many aspects, including throughput and QoE.