Interference mitigation for coexisting wireless body area networks: Distributed learning solutions

When multiple wireless body area networks (WBANs) exist in close proximity to each other, the inter-user interference considerably degrades the signal to interference plus noise ratio of the packets arriving at each WBAN coordinator. Also, the propagation paths within each WBAN experience fading due to the continuous changes in the body posture and mobility of the human body. The most preferred coexisting mechanisms specified in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard is the channel hopping mechanism, which fails to consider the varying radio environment and obtained reward in its channel selection. Thus, our paper investigates this channel selection problem for interference mitigation in a time-varying environment. We formulate this channel selection problem as a finite repeated potential game and propose two learning algorithms, Stochastic Learning Algorithm (SLA) and Stochastic Estimator Learning Algorithm (SELA) to achieve the Nash Equilibrium (NE) of the game. Numerical results show the convergence of the learning algorithms to the NE point of the game. The performance evaluation and impact of parameters on these two algorithms are also analyzed in our paper. © 2013 IEEE.