A lightweight and robust interference mitigation scheme for wireless body sensor networks in realistic environments

Abstract

In dense deployments of Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs), inter-user interference significantly degrades network performance when multiple WBSN users stay in a small area such as hospitals. Due to the high dynamics of the environments, it is usually hard to schedule the transmissions of multiple WBSNs without a central controller. In this paper, we propose a robust and lightweight interference mitigation scheme for realistic WBSN systems through adaptive channel hopping. A WBSN testbed is set up to investigate the impact of inter-user interference on various performance metrics when different severity levels of interference are present. Based on the measurement results, we propose a distributed interference detection and mitigation scheme without any central controller. A WBSN prototype system has been set up and shown that our proposed scheme can effectively detect and mitigate the multi-user interference, with tripling the network throughput in severely interfered environments.