Enabling Collaborative Data Uploading in Body-to-Body Networks

In body-to-body networks (BBNs), a group of closely located wireless body area network (WBAN) users aggregates their network resources to improve the overall physiological data uploading performances. This enables users with the poor Internet connection, i.e., requesting users, to upload their data through their nearby WBAN users with a good Internet connection, i.e., gateway users. In this letter, we investigate the data uploading problem for BBN, where the requesting users incentivize the gateway users for data uploading. However, since the gateway users incur an additional cost (energy and Internet access cost) for uploading data, and they are heterogeneous in terms of their cost, it is more challenging to design the incentive scheme for them. To address this, we formulate a Stackelberg game, where the requesting users as leaders propose the prices, and the gateway users as followers decide the amount of requesting users' data they would upload. We prove the existence of Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) of the game using backward induction. Finally, the numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed incentive mechanism.

I. Introduction

In recent years there is an unprecedented growth in the usage of wireless body area networks (WBANs), which is expected to reach 9 billion by 2022 [1], [2]. In a dense WBAN environment, where multiple WBAN users are located close to each other, coexistence will be a major issue while causing overall network throughput degradation [3], [4]. In this context, body-to-body network (BBN) appears as one of the most attractive solutions which enables cooperation and resource sharing among WBAN users to overcome the throughput degradation [5]. More specifically, BBN is a mesh network consisting of a group of WBAN users, where each WBAN user may act as a requesting node, a relay node, and gateway node (uploading data to the Internet). Each requesting WBAN user can simultaneously transmit its data to multiple gateway WBAN users over multi-hop paths and can serve as relay for other users [6]. Further, BBN provides a cost-effective solution for remote WBAN users monitoring in crowded indoor/outdoor environments and adverse environments (e.g. battlefield, mining, and disaster area) by allowing one WBAN user to transmit to nearby WBAN users and so on until reaching nearby WiFi or cellular access point without any external coordination [7].