Cooperative body-area-communications: Enhancing coexistence without coordination between networks

Abstract

In this paper, coexistence of multiple mobile wireless body area networks (WBANs), where there is no coordination between WBANs, is investigated for the case where the WBAN-of-interest employs cooperative communications. A decode-and-forward protocol with two dual-hop links, two relays and selection combining (SC) at the hub (or gateway device) is chosen for the WBAN-of-interest. A suitable time-divisionmultiple-access (TDMA) scheme is used, enabling intra-network and inter-network operation, to allocate slots for each Tx/Rx link packet transmission. Realistic channel models are employed with various amounts of shadowing, small-scale fading and white noise introduced between WBANs. For the WBAN-ofinterest, many hours of measured channel gain data is employed to emulate the channel for this WBAN. It is found that the chosen cooperative communications provides significantly better co-channel interference mitigation than single-link star topology WBAN communications in a mobile, dynamic, scenario, hence the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for 10% outage probability at the hub is greatly improved by up-to 12 dB. It is also demonstrated that the location of the hub, given three typical locations, has significant impact on the performance of the cooperative WBAN communications.

Enabling interference-aware and energy-efficient coexistence of multiple wireless body area networks with unknown dynamics

“…However, the social nature of WBANs and their high mobility does not allow coexistence of multiple WBANs to be controlled via a global coordinator [32]. When coexisting WBANs use the same channel, transmissions can conflict since the active periods will overlap [10].…”

“…15.4) or Zigbee (802.15.1) as their monitoring station where neither of them meet the power requirements of WBANs. Two hop cooperative communication has shown to provide major benefits to WBANs in both ultra-wideband and narrow-band communications [12,32,54,55]. One of these approaches considered the use of idle sensors as relays for cooperative receive diversity which achieved 15dB improvement in average bit-error probability using decode and forward relaying with cooperative diversity.…”

A survey of wireless technologies coexistence in WBAN: analysis and open research issues

“…Examples of the proposed solutions that belong to this category includes [57] and [103], other solutions can also be found in [29] and [58]. Cooperative scheduling of TDMA slots is used in [57] where an asynchronous internetwork interference avoidance scheme called AIIA was proposed.…”

Interference avoidance algorithm (IAA) for multi-hop wireless body area network communication

“…It has also adopted the two-hop communication scheme in the standard. Thus, adopting relay transmission is a very promising solution for co-channel interference reduction, energy efficiency and high reliable communications [15], [6], [16].…”

“…On the other hand, due to the constrained nature of WBANs (in terms of energy, size and cost), advanced antenna techniques can not be used for interference avoidance as well as power control mechanisms used in cellular networks are not applicable to WBANs [15], [16].…”