Priority-aware pricing-based capacity sharing scheme for beyond-wireless body area networks

In this paper, a radio resource allocation scheme for wireless body area networks (WBANs) is proposed. Unlike existing works in the literature, we focus on the communications in beyond-WBANs, and study the transmission scheduling under a scenario that there are a large number of gateways associating with one base station of medical centers. Motivated by the distinctions and requirements of beyond-WBAN communications, we introduce a priority-aware pricing-based capacity sharing scheme by taking into account the quality of service (QoS) requirements for different gateways. In the designed scheme, each gateway is intelligent to select transmission priorities and data rates according to its signal importance, and is charged by a price with regard to its transmission request. The capacity allocation is proceeded with guarantee of the absolute priority rule. In order to maximize the individual utility, gateways will compete with each other by choosing the optimal transmission strategies. Such decision process is formulated as a non-atomic game. Theoretical analyses show that our proposed pricing-based scheme can lead to an efficient Wardrop equilibrium. Through numerical results, we examine the convergence of strategy decisions, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed mechanism in improving the utilities of gateways.