Uncoordinated scheduling strategies for BAN-to-BAN interference mitigation

A Body Area Network (BAN) is a radio standard for wireless connectivity of wearable and implantable sensors located inside or in close proximity to the human body. Medical and some other applications impose stringent constraints on battery powered BAN reliability, quality of service, and power consumption. However, lack of coordination among multiple colocated BANs in the current BAN standard may cause unacceptable deterioration of BAN reliability and quality of service due to high levels of inter-BAN interference. Assuming Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), this paper proposes inter-BAN interference mitigation using several novel uncoordinated transmission scheduling algorithms. These algorithms use patterns of past and current interference for implicit coordination across multiple BAN transmissions. Simulation results demonstrate improvement in the performance and potential benefits of the proposed strategies.