Link-Quality-Aware Resource Allocation With Load Balance in Wireless Body Area Networks

Due to interference from other coexisting wireless body area networks (WBANs), link quality between a particular WBAN and access points (APs) significantly varies. Consequently, the performance of a WBAN varies with the changes in the link quality. Additionally, a WBAN unnecessarily tries to send its real-time data to the sink node, whereas the corresponding link quality drops below a predefined threshold value, to maintain adequate network performance. To address this situation, in this paper, we propose a link-quality-aware resource allocation scheme in WBANs—an effort toward maximizing the overall network performance. The proposed scheme consists of two phases— temporal link quality measurement and subchannel allocation among the WBANs . In the former, we predict correlations among different aspects of link quality. Based on the available correlated link qualities, the subchannel allocation phase divides the available bandwidth into several subchannels to maintain the quality of service of the network. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated based on different performance metrics—path loss, throughput, number of dead nodes, and fairness index of WBANs. The simulation results show that the performance of a WBAN significantly increases, if the link-quality-aware resource allocation is made between a WBAN and available APs.