Dynamic Channel Allocation for Interference Mitigation in Relay-assisted Wireless Body Networks

We focus on interference mitigation and energy conservation within a single wireless body area network (WBAN). We adopt two-hop communication scheme supported by the the IEEE 802.15.6 standard (2012). In this paper, we propose a dynamic channel allocation scheme, namely DCAIM to mitigate node-level interference amongst the coexisting regions of a WBAN. At the time, the sensors are in the radius communication of a relay, they form a relay region (RG) coordinated by that relay using time division multiple access (TDMA). In the proposed scheme, each RG creates a table consisting of interfering sensors which it broadcasts to its neighboring sensors. This broadcast allows each pair of RGs to create an interference set (IS). Thus, the members of IS are assigned orthogonal sub-channels whereas other sonsors that do not belong to IS can transmit using the same time slots. Experimental results show that our proposal mitigates node-level interference and improves node and WBAN energy savings. These results are then compared to the results of other schemes. As a result, our scheme outperforms in all cases. Node-level signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) improved by 11dB whilst, the energy consumption decreased significantly. We further present a probabilistic method and analytically show the outage probability can be effectively reduced to the minimal.