Dynamic channel allocation for interference mitigation in relay-assisted wireless body networks

We focus on interference mitigation and energy conservation within a single WBAN. We adopt two-hop communication scheme supported by the the IEEE 802.15.6 standard (2012). In this paper, we propose a dynamic channel allocation scheme (DCAIM) to mitigate node-level interference amongst the coexisting regions of a WBAN. At the time, the sensors are in the radius communication of a relay, they form a relay region (RG) coordinated by that relay using TDMA. In the proposed scheme, each RG creates a table consisting of interfering sensors which it broadcasts to its neighboring sensors. This broadcast allows each pair of RGs to create an interference region or set (IS). Thus, the members of IS are assigned orthogonal subchannels whereas other sonsors that do not belong to IS can transmit using the same time slots. Experimental results show that our proposal mitigates node-level interference and improves node and WBAN energy conservation. These results are then compared to the results of other schemes. As a result, our scheme outperforms in all cases. Node-level SINR improved by 11dB whilst, the energy consumption decreased by 20 times. We further present a probabilistic method and analytically show the outage probability can be effectively reduced to the minimal.