A Cooperative Beamforming Technique for Body Area Networks

We consider an indoor environment with multiple Body Area Networks (BANs) that have to transmit data towards specific sinks, located in fixed positions. Nodes deployed on the same body may cooperate in order to form Virtual Antenna Arrays (VAAs) and transmit data towards one of the available sinks. Sinks are also equipped with multiple antennas, such that a virtual Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) channel is established. Beamforming is used as a cooperation technique on both transmitter and receiver sides. A simple technique, consisting of decimating the number of cooperating nodes in the VAA with the aim of reducing energy consumption as well as interference, is presented. Results show that the proposed technique improves the performance in terms of energy efficiency, and also in terms of block error rate when the system is interference-limited. Performance is evaluated by applying different well-known scheduling strategies.