Internet of Vehicles for E-Health Applications: A Potential Game for Optimal Network Capacity

Wireless technologies are pervasive to support ubiquitous healthcare applications. However, a critical issue of using wireless communications under a healthcare scenario rests at the electromagnetic interference (EMI) caused by RF transmission, and a high level of EMI may lead to a critical malfunction of medical sensors. In view of EMI on medical sensors, we propose a power control algorithm under a noncooperative game theoretic framework to schedule data transmission. Our objective is to ensure that the noncooperative game of power control can achieve a network-level objective—the optimal network capacity, although the wireless users are selfish and only interested in optimizing their own channel capacity. To obtain this objective, we show that our proposed noncooperative game is a potential game and propose the best-response-dynamics algorithm which can ensure that the game strategy of each user is induced to the optimal solution to the problem of network-level optimal capacity. Numerical results illustrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve an enhancement of 8% of network performance than the existing algorithm against the variations of mobile hospital environments.