Enabling Collaborative Data Uploading in Body-to-Body Networks

In body-to-body networks (BBNs), a group of closely located wireless body area network (WBAN) users aggregates their network resources to improve the overall physiological data uploading performances. This enables users with the poor Internet connection, i.e., requesting users, to upload their data through their nearby WBAN users with a good Internet connection, i.e., gateway users. In this letter, we investigate the data uploading problem for BBN, where the requesting users incentivize the gateway users for data uploading. However, since the gateway users incur an additional cost (energy and Internet access cost) for uploading data, and they are heterogeneous in terms of their cost, it is more challenging to design the incentive scheme for them. To address this, we formulate a Stackelberg game, where the requesting users as leaders propose the prices, and the gateway users as followers decide the amount of requesting users’ data they would upload. We prove the existence of Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) of the game using backward induction. Finally, the numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed incentive mechanism.