An optimal backoff time-based internetwork interference mitigation method in wireless body area network

When multiple Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are aggregated, the overlapping region of their communications will result in internetwork interference, which could impose severe impacts on the reliability of WBAN performance. Therefore, how to mitigate the internetwork interference becomes the key problem to be solved urgently in practical applications of WBAN. However, most of the current researches on internetwork interference focus on traditional cellular networks and large-scale wireless sensor networks. In this paper, an Optimal Backoff Time Interference Mitigation Algorithm (OBTIM) is proposed. This method performs rescheduling or channel switching when the performance of the WBANs falls below tolerance, utilizing the cell neighbour list established by the beacon method. Simulation results show that the proposed method improves the channel utilization and the network throughput, and in the meantime, reduces the collision probability and energy consumption, when compared with the contention-based beacon schedule scheme.