Priority-Aware Price-Based Power Control for Co-Located WBANs Using Stackelberg and Bayesian Games

According to the IEEE 802.15.6 standard, interference within each wireless body area network (WBAN) can be well addressed by the time division multiple access (TDMA)-based media access control (MAC) protocol. However, the inter-WBAN interference will be caused after multiple WBANs are gathered together. This paper proposes a priority-aware price-based power control (PPPC) scheme for mitigating the inter-WBAN interference. Specifically, to maximize the transmission data rate of sensors and control the aggregate interference suffered by coordinators, a Stackelberg game is established, in which the coordinators issue interference prices and the active sensors adjust their transmission power accordingly. On the other hand, since the information about the identities of the active sensors in a specific time slot is kept private, a Bayesian game is designed to model the interaction among sensors. Moreover, the timeliness and reliability of data transmission are guaranteed by designing the sensors’ priority factors and setting a priority-related active probability for each sensor. At last, a power control algorithm is designed to obtain optimal strategies of game players. Simulation results show that compared with other existing schemes, the proposed scheme achieves better fairness with a comparable network sum data rate and is more energy efficient.