Cooperative Beamforming and Scheduling Strategies for Body Area Networks

We consider an indoor environment with multiple Body Area Networks (BANs) that have to transmit data towards specific sinks, located in fixed positions. Nodes deployed on the same body may cooperate in order to form Virtual Antenna Arrays (VAA) and transmit data towards one of the available sinks. Sinks are also equipped with multiple antennas, such that a virtual Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) channel can be established. Beamforming is used as cooperation technique. Results obtained through simulations clearly show the advantages of cooperation among nodes in BANs. We also investigate different scheduling techniques that sinks may adopt in order to optimise different performance metrics.