Proposal of Cell-Free Model with Power Control Algorithm for Enhancing Throughput of Uplink WBANs

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have gained significant attention due to their versatile applications in health-care and the rapid development of personal healthcare devices. This paper proposes a novel cell-free (CF) model for WBANs, where multiple access points (APs) instantaneously support distributed sensors placed on the body by allowing all sensors to share the same time and frequency resources. Furthermore, a transmit power control algorithm is proposed to control the transmit power of sensors of the CF model WBAN based on channel conditions in order to reduce the inter-user interference, maintain the fairness of all sensors, and then improve the per-sensor throughput. The achievable uplink data rates are derived using matched filtering, resulting in a closed-form solution. The proposed CF model and transmit power control algorithm are compared with the CF model without power control and traditional star topology WBANs to assess the effectiveness of the proposed approaches via several key parameters, including the number of sensors, the quantity of APs, and the length of pilot sequences. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approaches enhance the throughput per sensor in the uplink of CF-WBAN across all tested scenarios.