When sensors of different coexisting wireless body area networks (WBANs) transmit at the same time using the same channel, a co-channel interference is experienced and hence the performance of the involved WBANs may be degraded. In this paper, we exploit the 16 channels available in the 2.4 GHz international band of ZIGBEE, and propose a distributed scheme that avoids interference through predictable channel hopping based on Latin rectangles, namely, CHIM. In the proposed CHIM scheme, each WBAN's coordinator picks a Latin rectangle whose rows are ZIGBEE channels and columns are sensor IDs. Based on the Latin rectangle of the individual WBAN, each sensor is allocated a backup time-slot and a channel to use if it experiences interference such that collisions among different transmissions of coexisting WBANs are minimized. We further present a mathematical analysis that derives the collision probability of each sensor's transmission in the network. In addition, the efficiency of CHIM in terms of transmission delay and energy consumption minimization are validated by simulations.
A scheme for two-hop relay-assisted cooperative communications integrated with transmit power control, based on simple channel prediction, is presented. A large set of empirical on- and inter-body channel data is employed to model various scenarios of wireless body area network (WBAN) communica- tions, from one isolated WBAN up to 10 closely located WBANs coexisting. Our study shows that relay assisted power control can reduce approximately 60 circuit power consumption from that of constant transmission at 0 dBm, without much loss in reliability. Further, interference mitigation is significantly enhanced over constant transmission at −5 dBm, with similar power consumption. Such performance is maintained from 2 to 10 closely-located WBANs coexisting. And the joint algorithm works best for one isolated WBAN. A trade-off between power saving and interference mitigation is motivated, taking remaining sensor-battery level, amount of interference and on-body channel quality into account. Index Terms—Cooperative communications, interference mit- igation, transmit power control, wireless body area networks. Wireless body area network (WBAN) is an emerging technology that provides socialized health monitoring service. However, the quality of service can be severely degraded by concomitant inter-WBAN interference in some specific environments where multiple WBANs are densely deployed, e.g., hospitals and senior citizen communities. In this work, we propose a Bayesian game based power control scheme to mitigate the impact of inter-WBAN interference. By modeling WBANs as players and active links as types of players in the Bayesian game model, the proposed power control scheme tries to maximize each player's expected payoff involving both throughput and energy efficiency. We prove the existence of Bayesian equilibrium (BE) for the proposed power control game and also derive a practical sufficient condition for the uniqueness of BE. A harmonic mean based algorithm is then proposed to obtain an approximation of BE point without the need to pass message among WBANs, which satisfies the non-cooperative manner for inter-WBAN interference mitigation. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can converge to the BE point effectively. In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-hop interference avoidance algorithm, namely, IAA to avoid co-channel interference inside a wireless body area network (WBAN). Our proposal adopts carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA CA) between sources and relays and a flexible time division multiple access (FTDMA) between relays and coordinator. The proposed scheme enables low interfering nodes to transmit their messages using base channel. Depending on suitable situations, high interfering nodes double their contention windows (CW) and probably use switched orthogonal channel. Simulation results show that proposed scheme has far better minimum SINR (12dB improvement) and longer energy lifetime than other schemes (power control and opportunistic relaying). Additionally, we validate our proposal in a theoretical analysis and also propose a probabilistic approach to prove the outage probability can be effectively reduced to the minimal.