Uncoordinated Strategies for Inter-BAN Interference Mitigation

A Body Area Network (BAN) is a radio standard for wireless connectivity of wearable and implantable sensor nodes that are located inside or in proximity to the human body. Many applications of BANs (e.g. physiological monitoring) require reliable communication of information between the sensor nodes and their controller. As there are currently no coordinating mechanisms among multiple co-located BANs, interference caused by co-channel transmission in adjacent BANs could impact the reliability and in general quality of the service experienced by a receiver node within an individual BAN. Here, we present a simulation platform that allows for statistical evaluation of interference in multi-BAN scenarios and performance of possible mitigation algorithms. Currently, there are no mechanisms for interfering BANs to explicitly coordinate their transmissions. As our analysis show, this may result in unacceptably high interference; and therefore, high link outage probability by the intended receiver. We propose uncoordinated approaches that could help to ease cross-interference among multiple adjacent BANs. Simulation results in our preliminary studies support the effectiveness of our approach.