An adaptive scheduling scheme for interference reduction in wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are envisioned as a key enabling technology for the next-generation pervasive healthcare systems. Characterized by limited energy and computational resources, inter-user interference deteriorates reliable data transmission when multiple WBANs are transmitting simultaneously on the same channel in close proximity, making it one of the greatest challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed adaptive scheduling scheme to reduce interference among co-existing WBANs. The basic idea of this scheduling scheme is to avoid the overlap of active beacon period of neighboring WBANs. The performance of the proposed scheme was compared with schemes based on IEEE 802.15.6 using an OMNET++ simulator. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs better in terms of packet delivery ratio, energy consumption and delivery latency than the schemes based on IEEE 802.15.6.