A Novel Genetic-Fuzzy Power Controller

with Feedback for Interference Mitigation in

Wireless Body Area Networks
Ramtin Kazemi, IEEE Member, Rein Vesilo, Eryk Dutkiewicz
Department of Electronic Engineering
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
E-mails: {ramtin.kazemi, rein.vesilo, eryk.dutkiewicz}@mq.edu.au
Abstract Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are an
emerging technology for short-range wireless communication
inside, on or around the human body, mainly for medical
applications. A WBANs scarcest resource is power. Due to the
mobility of WBANs as well as the limited number of available
channels, signals of neighboring WBANs can cause interference
that may severely degrade the reliability and performance of the
system and lead to more power consumption. In this paper, we
propose a fast converging fuzzy power controller (FPC) with
feedback whose inputs are the current interference power level,
Signal-to-Interference-and-Noise (SINR) and the current
transmission power level to provide interference mitigation in
WBANs. We utilize a genetic algorithm to design and optimize
the FPC to simultaneously maximize capacity, minimize power
consumption and minimize convergence time. We compare the
performance of the proposed approach with two game-theory
power control approaches. Our simulation results show that
compared to these other approaches, the proposed FPC provides
a substantial saving in power consumption as well as quick
convergence that is independent of the number of nodes in the
system, while sacrificing only a small amount of capacity.
Keywords WBAN; Interference; Power Control; Fuzzy Logic;
Genetic Algorithms; Game theory.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Recent advancements in different fields of science and

engineering, including wireless communications and
electronics, have promised the development of an emerging
kind of sensor network called a Wireless Body Area Network
(WBAN). A WBAN comprises a number of tiny sensor nodes
attached to or implanted inside the human body that
communicate with a gateway node in the same WBAN as a
coordinator and data collector, for the purpose of real-time
monitoring of patients physiological parameters, such as
ECG, EEG, blood pressure and so forth. WBANs will
significantly save costs and time for both health care
professionals and patients due to the mobility of patients and
location independent monitoring. Standards for the physical
layer (PHY) and the media access control (MAC) layer of
WBANs are currently being developed by IEEE 802.15 Task
Group 6 (TG6) that was established in November 2007.
Because of their structure and mobility, WBANs are quite
likely to overlap each other. Although WBANs will usually
search for a free channel to use, they may still interfere with
each other due to the limited number of available channels.
This inter-network interference will cause serious problems in
WBANs. It will reduce the Signal-to-Interference-and-Noise

Ratio (SINR) and thereby cause throughput degradation and

packet loss. Packet loss also leads to energy waste, which is
the scarcest resource in WBANs because in most cases
replacing the batteries of implanted sensors is impractical and
they are required to work for many years or less, depending on
their applications. Furthermore, interference may cause life
critical packet loss and hence it may be a serious threat to
patients lives.
Transmission power control plays an important role in
interference mitigation and resource management in wireless
networks [1][2]. Some works (e.g. [3][4]) have considered
inter-network interference cancellation for WLANs, where
CSMA media access protocols and backoff collision
resolution mechanisms are used. In some other works (e.g.
[5][6]) a centralized power control approach has been used,
which is not suitable for WBANs since each WBAN works
independently in a distributed manner. More recently, the
power control problem has been addressed using game theory,
for example, in CDMA networks [7][8] and distributed
networks [9][10]. Game theory approaches, however, usually
require some negotiations between WBANs to reach a Nash
Equilibrium (NE) in a distributed manner. Besides, the NE is
not necessarily the optimal solution but just a stable solution.
It should be noted that these negotiations do not imply
cooperation and even in non-cooperative games are
sometimes required.
In this paper, we follow an alternative approach to the
power control problem and use fuzzy logic controllers
[11][12]. In contrast to game-theory based power control
approaches, fuzzy power controllers (FPC) do not rely on any
negotiation between nodes in different WBANs. This is a very
important advantage of FPC to power control games, because
in high interference conditions such negotiations to mitigate
interference cannot take place practically.
Another benefit of FPC over power control games is faster
convergence. Players in a non-cooperative game all try to
reach a NE using a mechanism such as best-response, which is
the strategy where each player maximizes his own payoff. It is
known that when all players use best-response strategy, they
will converge to a NE after a limited number of iterations [14].
However, due to the variability of the wireless channel and
other dynamic parameters, players cannot be sure that they are
calculating exactly the best-response based on the other
players best responses, thereby leading to a slower

978-1-4244-8331-0/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

convergence to the NE. On the other hand, FPC does not need
any iteration to yield the output at all and will respond
immediately which will make it quite suitable for very
dynamic environments.
Fuzzy controllers have the advantages of robustness, ease
of design and flexibility. Besides, in fuzzy control, an exact
mathematical model is not necessary, because linguistic
variables are used to define the system behavior making the
design process simpler. Also, fuzzy controllers have shown a
great ability to map nonlinear and complicated relationships
between input and output spaces [13].
Some examples of the use of fuzzy controllers in wireless
systems include the following. In [15], a fuzzy open-loop
transmission power control for WLANs has been proposed
which aims to minimize node transmission power, while
keeping the transmission errors at an acceptable level. The
authors in [16] proposed a transmission power adjustment
scheme using the fuzzy control in wireless sensor networks
for dynamic topology control. For further study of the
utilization of fuzzy logic for power control in CDMA
networks refer to [17][18].

Fig. 1.

Interference Model

We will develop a fuzzy power control mechanism to

manage the interference effects on throughput and power
consumption. The FPC makes decisions about transmission
power (Pt) based on the values of its inputs. The inputs used
are the current levels of interference power (PI), SINR and
transmission power, P (t ) , fed back from the output to the
controller. The output of the FPC is the level of transmission
power at time t + , P (t + ) . The structure of the FPC is
t

Although one of the most useful features of a fuzzy system

is to incorporate human expert knowledge, tuning or
designing a fuzzy system using an automated learning process
such as a genetic algorithm (GA) has received extensive
attention over the past decade [19]. In this paper, we will
employ the GA to determine the optimal fuzzy controller
parameters. The optimization problem we have the GA solve
is to create a fuzzy controller which uses the minimum
amount of transmission power to maximize link throughput
taking into account the current condition of transmission
power, interference, SINR, and convergence time.

structure for power control and inter-network interference

mitigation. In Section III, the GA and the learning process to
design and optimize the fuzzy controller is described. Section
IV comprises performance simulations and, finally, Section V
concludes the paper.
II. SYSTEM MODEL
We consider a system of multiple WBANs transmitting
concurrently where nearby WBANs transmission ranges
overlap with each other causing inter-network interference to
neighboring WBANs. The transmissions considered can be
either from the sensor node to its gateway or vice versa. It is
assumed that no intra-network collisions occur between sensor
nodes and the gateway within each single WBAN because, for
example, they employ a TDMA-based MAC scheme for
communication. This model is depicted in Fig 1.

shown in Fig 2.

Our main contributions in this paper can be summarized as:

We develop a FPC in WBANs, which takes into
consideration inter-network interference from nearby WBANs.
We employ the GA to optimally determine the FPC
parameters to maximize throughput by reducing crossinterference between links in different WBANs and at the same
time minimizing power consumption.
We include a feedback input to the FPC to improve
decision making about transmission power levels and employ
the GA to speed up the convergence of the output.
We evaluate the performance of the proposed FPC
through an accurate simulation setup using the channel model
proposed for implanted nodes in the TG6 standard draft [20] in
the MICS frequency band.
We compare the performance of the proposed FPC with
two game-theory power control approaches. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first paper in the literature which utilizes
fuzzy logic for the power control problem in WBANs and
compares the fuzzy power control approach to game theory
power control approaches.
The rest of this paper is organized as follow: In Section II,
we explain the system model and describe the fuzzy controller

Fig. 2.

Structure of the Fuzzy Power Controller (FPC)

Both PI and SINR can be measured at a digital receiver and

can be sent back to the transmitter via an error-free feedback
control channel. This assumption has been used by many
papers in the literature in other types of wireless systems (see
e.g. [21][22]). It is reasonable also in the context of WBANs
because the feedback channel is located between a transmitter
and receiver which are in the same WBAN, and such a very
low throughput feedback channel can become error-free using
channel coding techniques [23]. Unlike power control game
approaches which usually demand negotiations between nodes
in different WBANs to reach a NE, these feedback parameters
are the only ones required by the FPC proposed.
As depicted in Fig 2, transmission power level Pt is a
feedback input in the controller structure. Due to this feedback
mechanism, the steady state behavior of the controller
becomes important in terms of how fast the controller output
converges to its steady state. We will take the convergence

speed into consideration when optimizing the controller using

the GA, and design a controller which converges as quickly as
possible.
Each input fuzzy variable i is expressed using K linguistic
terms corresponding to K membership functions (MF) denoted
by MFi, j ; j [1, K ] . Kout membership functions are also

standard deviation of the membership function. To be codified

as genes, this function requires two real valued numbers
bounded by the universe of discourse of the input, as seen in
Fig 4.

assigned to the output variable, denoted by MFout , j ; j [1, K out ].

We will obtain the optimum values for the parameters of these
membership functions as well as the fuzzy rules using the GA,
explained in the next section.
III.

GENETIC LEARNING

Fig. 3.

Learning process in the Genetic-Fuzzy System (GFS)

A.

Chromosome Structure
To codify the fuzzy controller as a chromosome, we
consider that each chromosome is formed by two parts:
parametric genes and rule genes that represent the fuzzy
membership functions and the fuzzy rules, respectively. For
the membership functions, we use a Gaussian function:
( x mij ) 2

ij ( x) = e

2 ij2

(1)

where ij is the membership function of the jth fuzzy set

related to input i, and mij and ij are the center position and the

Fig. 4.

Membership Functions and the Corresponding Genes

The chromosome part corresponding to the fuzzy rules of

the FPC is shown in Fig 5.

Fig. 5.

Rule Genes in the chromosome structure

In this figure, rijk [1, K ] is an integer valued number

representing the fuzzy logic rule as follows:
IF (PI is MF1,i) AND (SINR is MF2,j) AND (Pt(t) is MF3,k)
THEN ( P (t + ) is MFout ,r )
t

Genetic algorithms (GA) [24] are stochastic search

algorithms based on Darwins theory of evolution, where an
objective function, called fitness is optimized. The inputs to
the fitness function are the potential solutions to the problem
coded as chromosomes. The GA operates over a set of
chromosomes, called the population, where recombination
operators such as crossover and mutation are applied in an
iterative way to obtain new individuals, called generations.
This iterative process consists of selection, recombination,
mutation and evaluation phases that proceed in the given
order repeatedly until a stop criterion is fulfilled, such as the
maximum number of generations allowed, or finding a good
enough individual.
From the viewpoint of optimization, the GA learning
mechanism is equivalent to parameterizing the fuzzy
knowledge base (KB), i.e. rules and membership functions,
and to finding those parameter values that are optimal with
respect to the design criteria. The KB parameters constitute
the optimization space, which are transformed into a suitable
genetic representation as chromosomes on which the search
process operates. This genetic-fuzzy system (GFS) is shown
in Fig 3.

ijk

B.

Genetic Operators
Since we have real valued genes codifying the membership
function parameters and integer valued genes codifying the
fuzzy rules in the chromosome structure, we do not employ
the usual binary code operators, i.e. N-point crossover and bit
inversion for recombination and mutation respectively.
Instead, for recombination, we use two crossover methods
comprising arithmetic and heuristic crossovers being selected
randomly with equal probabilities. In arithmetic crossover, an
interpolation along the line formed by the corresponding
genes of two parents is performed, while in the heuristic
crossover, an extrapolation is done along the line formed by
the two parents outward in the direction of the better parent.
The mutation operator is uniformly selected from three
methods which are Gaussian, uniform and non-uniform
mutations. In the Gaussian mutation, the gene is changed with
the probability of a normal Gaussian distribution. The other
two methods change the value of the gene based on a uniform
distribution and non-uniform distribution respectively in the
specified range of the variable.
The selection strategy utilized to pick individuals into the
mating pool to produce an offspring for the next generation is
a ranking selection based on the geometric distribution.
C.

Learning Strategy
During the learning process, in addition to the elitism that
takes place at each generation, referred to as over-generation
elitism, we also employ an over-step elitism in which after a
certain number of generations, the WBANs move according to

IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

In this section, we evaluate the performance of the proposed
genetic fuzzy power controller. We setup an LxL square area,
with L being the length of a side. Inside this area, WBANs
move around according to a Random Walk model. For each
WBAN, we consider one implanted sensor node inside the
body at a depth of 50mm from the body surface that
communicates with its gateway that is located one meter away
from it on the body surface. The transmissions considered can
be either from the WBAN node to its gateway or vice versa.
As WBANs move around, channel gains are calculated based
on the channel models (CM) proposed in the TG6 standard
draft [20]. This draft specifies different models for different
path types: in-body path from the sensor node to the body
surface (CM1), on-body path from the body surface to the
gateway in the same WBAN (CM3), and off-body path from
the body surface to a gateway in another WBAN (CM4).
We calculate the SINR at any receiver i according to Eq. 3:

TABLE I.

SIMULATION TRAINING/TESTING PARAMETERS

All simulation plots show the statistical averages over 1000

runs of the algorithms. Confidence Intervals (CI) of 95% are
not shown on the plots as they are too small to display.
Figure 6 depicts the average node power consumption as a
function of the number of nodes in the system for different
controllers. As can be clearly seen, the FPC outperforms the
other two approaches in terms of energy saving by consuming
the least transmission power. When there are a large number
of nodes, ADP and PCG consume almost 55% and 20% more
power than FPC, respectively. While for a small number of
nodes, the PCG consumes nearly 40% more power.

hii P i

( P , P ) = log(1 + SINRi ) ci P
(4)
where ci and are pricing parameters which provides the
ability to adjust the tradeoff between capacity and power
consumption.
In [25], the authors proved the existence and uniqueness of
the NE in this game and proposed a best-response strategy for
players to reach the NE.
The second approach is the ADP algorithm [26], which is a
game theory based power allocation approach designed for
sensor networks. The ADP algorithm applies a pricing
mechanism to coordinate interference among nearby nodes so
as to improve the overall system capacity.
Table 1 summarizes the parameters and their values used in
our simulations.
t

Fitness Function
The GA tries to find the individual which maximizes a
given fitness function that conveys the objectives of the
optimization problem at hand. In the present case, the
optimization problem the GA solves is to find a fuzzy
controller which maximizes link capacity using as little power
for transmission as possible in the shortest convergence time.
A candidate fitness function reflecting these objectives can be
as follows:
= C P N
(2)
where C is the link capacity calculated using the Shannon
channel capacity formula: B log 2 (1 + SINR ) , normalized by the
maximum capacity achievable at zero interference; P is the
value of transmission power normalized by the maximum
power Pmax; N is the normalized value for the maximum
number of iterations needed by the FPC to converge to a
steady state output; and , , and are weighting factors
whose dimensions make dimensionless. Their values can be
varied to change the importance of C, P, and N in the fitness
function. In this study we set all the weighting factors to one.

We compare the proposed FPC with two other approaches

in the literature which are based on the game theory. The first
approach is a power control game (PCG) proposed in [25].
The payoff function in this PCG is as follows:
t

D.

transmitter j and receiver i; N 0 is the ambient noise power and

B is the channel bandwidth.

a Random Walk model, and the best individuals are copied

directly to the next newly initialized population. The number
of best individuals copied during the over-step elitism is not
fixed but increases linearly with the number of Random Walk
steps have done so far to speed up the convergence. Moreover,
in order to get the controller adapted to all different
circumstances, the number of nodes in the system also
changes after a certain number of steps, with the over-step
elitism again keeping the best individuals.

h
j i

ji

P j + B.N 0
t

SINRi =

(3)

where Pti and Pt are transmission power levels of transmitter

j
i and j, hii is the channel gain between transmitter i and
receiver i, h ji is the inter-network channel gain between

Fig. 6.

Average node power consumption versus the number of nodes

Figure 7 shows average capacity per node versus the

number of nodes in the system. The graphs show that ADP
and PCG have almost the same performance and provide
almost 20% more capacity than FPC for a small number of

nodes in the system. However, this superiority drops when the

number of nodes in the system increases, where all the three
controllers provide roughly the same link capacity.

Fig. 7. Nodes Average link

capacity versus the number of nodes

Fig. 8. Convergence time versus the

number of nodes

Finally, Fig. 8 shows the number of iterations needed by

each approach to converge versus the number of nodes in the
system. It is readily observed that FPC outperforms
significantly the other two approaches. Moreover, the
convergence time of FPC is independent of the number of
nodes whereas for PCG and ADP, the convergence time
increases with the number of nodes.
V. CONCLUSIONS
We have developed a fast converging FPC with feedback to
provide interference mitigation in WBANs. A GA was
developed to design and optimize the FPC in terms of capacity
maximization, power consumption minimization and
convergence time minimization. We compared the
performance of the proposed approach with two game-theory
power control approaches called PCG and ADP. Simulation
results show that, in comparison with PCG and ADP, the
proposed FPC provided a substantial power saving as well as
quick convergence being also independent of the number of
nodes in the system, while sacrificing only a small amount of
capacity. Our future work will focus on implementing these
methods on a WBAN hardware testbed by defining related
MAC protocols to support the control procedures.
Performance of the algorithms will be tested and verified
using our WBAN hardware platform.
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