Homogeneous interference mitigation techniques for wireless body area network under coexistence: A survey

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) enables the monitoring of vital human parameters using on and in body sensor devices. IEEE 802.15.6 standard defines the medium access and physical layer characteristics for WBANs. Body area networks use the unlicensed 2.4 GHz frequency band and have very limited communication power. Communication of WBAN is affected severely by interference due to coexistence with WBANs and/or other wireless networks. Different solutions are proposed in existing literature for interference mitigation due to coexistence. To the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive survey of interference mitigation techniques especially compiled for IEEE 802.15.6 is not present. In this paper, we discuss and categorize the existing interference mitigation strategies for WBAN. Furthermore, this paper evaluates the performance of various existing strategies in terms of their mitigation capacity, communication overhead, processing overhead and energy consumption.