AIM: Adaptive Internetwork interference mitigation amongst co-existing wireless body area networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel adaptive internetwork interference mitigation scheme, namely AIM, for environments with multiple coexisting Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). The proposed scheme, operating on a nodes' traffic priority, packet length, signal strength and density of sensors in a WBAN, makes three major contributions as compared to the current literature. Firstly, it considers node-level interference for internetwork interference mitigation rather than considering each WBAN as a whole. Secondly, it allocates synchronous and parallel transmission intervals for interference avoidance in an optimal manner. Finally, it significantly reduces the number of orthogonal channels assigned to achieve a higher throughput as well as better usage of the scarce limitation of resources in WBANs. Simulation results show that our protocol achieves a significantly higher spatial reuse compared to existing approaches for interference mitigation in WBANs.