Dynamic Interference Analysis of Coexisting Mobile WBANs for Health Monitoring

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) technology jumps into popularity owing to its real-time ability and high reliability in health monitoring. The accompanying interference problem must be highly concerned in coexisting densely deployed WBANs since the inter-WBAN interference results in high delay and low reliability data transmissions, especially with the movement of human body. In the paper, we analyze the dynamic interference with human mobility in multiple coexisting WBANs with the consideration of different distances between inter-WBANs and varying number of coexisting WBANs. Moreover, we investigate the influence of inter- WBAN interference on the performance of normalized throughput and average access delay of different traffic types. The results show that the interference generated by mobile neighbour WBANs extremely decreases the throughput of the target WBAN and increases the average packet delay 1.76 times of emergency data compared with the target WBAN without interference. The dynamic interference analysis provides insights on the practical WBAN management and interference mitigation protocol design, especially for the deeply deployed coexisting WBAN scenarios.