Collaborative and Efficient Body-to-Body Networks for IoT-Based Healthcare Systems

The recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT)-based healthcare systems pave the path for the development of body-to-body network (BBN), wherein a group of wireless body area network (WBAN) users collaborates and shares their individual resources. Since these WBAN users have individual decision-making capabilities and are self-centric in nature, they always aim to maximize their own performance while expecting benefits through resource sharing. In this article, we analyze the interaction among participating WBANs in BBN and develop joint data uploading and relaying strategy. In BBN, each WBAN not only utilizes its resources (uplink capacity and battery energy) to upload physiological data but also trades resources with other participating WBANs. Specifically, WBAN users with unused resources trade with other users deprived of Internet connection and low battery for mutual gain. Therefore, we model this interaction as an <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N $ </tex-math></inline-formula> -person bargaining game and design an efficient incentive mechanism to facilitate user cooperation. The proposed mechanism ensures efficient resource sharing and fair division of mutual benefit among the participating WBAN users. Also, we propose a distributed algorithm for the practical implementation of the proposed mechanism in decentralized BBN. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism always improves WBAN user’s individual performance together with the overall BBN performance. Furthermore, the overall performance increases with an increase in participating WBAN users’ resource heterogeneity.