Interference mitigation between WBAN equipped patients

A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) consists of different tiny physiological wearable sensors to monitor the vital signs of a human body and these sensor nodes transmit in real-time the sensed physiological information to the on-body coordinator or server over a wireless medium. Any radio frequency based wireless device suffers from interference due to the existence of other wireless devices operating in the same frequency band. In this paper we address the problem of interference when multiple WBANs come in the proximity of one another. We propose a TDMA-based solution that creates a common schedule between these WBANs, so that there is seamless communication with their sensors without interference among them, while increasing the cost of latency per node. Also, when these TDMA based WBANs come in the close proximity of one another, they sense the existence of other interfering WBANs. Our solution proposed a scheme that defines the time when to exchange their TDMA schedules. We simulated the proposed solution using NS-3 network simulator and it is observed that there is improvement in the percentage of packet delivery by using the proposed scheme. It is also observed that the increase of speed of WBANs leads to decrease in the percentage of packet delivery.