A Distributed Multi-Coloring Algorithm for Coexistence Mitigation in WBANs

A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) which consists of wireless sensors in/on/around human body requires high reliability for medical data. The coexistence problem which occurs when multiple-WBANs occupy the same channel at the same time declines the performance of the network. It is an important issue because this problem causes the collision of data among WBANs. For that reason, the IEEE 802.15.6 which was established for WBAN standardization defined guidelines to solve this problem, but these guidelines did not provide detailed methods. To solve this problem, there are also a few related works by using graph coloring algorithm as a general theory to assign limited resources but they cannot satisfy the requirements of WBAN. In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-coloring algorithm to mitigate coexistence problems among WBANs. The proposed algorithm shows short transmission-cycle per WBAN through multiple coloring with a color sequence and the efficiency of the proposed scheme is verified by the numerical results which outperform existing works in multiple WBANs environment.