Coloring-based scheduling for interactive game application with wireless body area networks

A wireless body area network (WBAN) consists of wireless sensors and a central processing device collecting data from the sensors. The WBAN is used to monitor human physical actions. This is applicable to an interactive game with multiple WBANs, i.e., multiple players, by using light-weight and wearable sensors. In the interactive game application, WBANs which are positioned in a place need to be relayed to communicate with a wireless home contents server connecting to a game server, where a WBAN has a short communication range. In this application, two problems are encountered: the WBANs interfere with each other due to a shared wireless medium, and WBANs which are located nearby to the wireless home contents server require to convey more data than necessary due to the relayed data. This degrades a total network throughput. In this paper, we present a coloring-based scheduling method to avoid the interference by allocating different time-slots to adjacent WBANs and to increase the total throughput by allocating more time-slots to traffic-intensive WBANs. The method is evaluated via simulations and discussed.