Interference Mitigation Techniques in Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

A wireless body area network (WBAN) consists of a single coordinator and multiple low-power sensors to monitor the biological signals and functions of the human body. Due to the highly mobile and social nature of WBANs, the performance of the individual WBANs could be degraded due to the adverse co-channel interference that results from their uncoordinated coexistence with other nearby wireless networks. Like other wireless networks, energy and spectrum in WBANs are both scarce resources. In fact, the limited spectrum resource is the cause of competition among WBANs and leads to interference. Dynamic and efficacious energy and interference management taking into account the channel state and traffics are both crucial and substantial to further upgrade the capacity and enhance the goodness of user experience. In addition to the co-channel interference, the individual communication links between the body-mounted sensors and the WBAN’s coordinator experience high signal attenuation and distortion due to the nonhomogeneous nature of the human body tissue. In this chapter, the issues related to the coexistence among WBANs and between WBANs and other wireless networks will be analyzed. A comparative review of the radio co-channel interference mitigation and avoidance techniques in the literature will be provided. Furthermore, we show that the existing solutions fall short from achieving satisfactory performance, and outline open problems that warrant more investigation by the research community.