Inter-network interference mitigation in Wireless Body Area Networks using power control games

In this paper, we propose a non-cooperative power control game to mitigate inter-network interference in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), which use emerging short-range wireless communication technology inside, on or around the human body for healthcare, entertainment and ubiquitous computing purposes. Interference endangers the reliability of WBANs especially in critical medical applications and also leads to more power consumption in very energy-constrained WBANs. Coordinating transmission power levels, we increase the system total throughput in the presence of interference using as little power as possible. We utilize non-linear and adaptive power pricing functions to penalize high power users and increase capacity in better channels. We investigate the Nash equilibrium existence and uniqueness and propose the best response strategy in the game to reach the Nash equilibrium.