Evolutionary design of fuzzy logic controllers for medium access control in WBAN

Soft computing techniques including fuzzy logic have been successfully applied to Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). However, most of the existing research works rely on manual design of the Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC). To address this issue, in this paper, we propose to use Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques to automate the design of FLCs for cross layer medium access control in WBANs. With the goal of improving network reliability while keeping the communication delay at a low level, we have particularly experimented on three different coding schemes. The influence of fitness functions has also been examined carefully in order to achieve a good balance between reliability and performance. We have also evaluated the effectiveness of two widely used evolutionary algorithms. Particularly, Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) is shown to be more effective than Differential Evolution (DE) for our design problem. Moreover, the FLC designed by our approach is also shown to outperform some related algorithms as well as the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.