A Study on Coexistence Capability Evaluations of the Enhanced Channel Hopping Mechanism in WBANs

Abstract

As an important coexistence technology, channel hopping can reduce the interference among Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). However, it simultaneously brings some issues, such as energy waste, long latency and communication interruptions, etc. In this paper, we propose an enhanced channel hopping mechanism that allows multiple WBANs coexisted in the same channel. In order to evaluate the coexistence performance, some critical metrics are designed to reflect the possibility of channel conflict. Furthermore, by taking the queuing and non-queuing behaviors into consideration, we present a set of analysis approaches to evaluate the coexistence capability. On the one hand, we present both service-dependent and service-independent analysis models to estimate the number of coexisting WBANs. On the other hand, based on the uniform distribution assumption and the additive property of Possion-stream, we put forward two approximate methods to compute the number of occupied channels. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our estimation approaches can provide an effective solution for coexistence capability estimation. Moreover, the enhanced channel hopping mechanism can significantly improve the coexistence capability and support a larger arrival rate of WBANs.

Interference and Priority Aware Coexistence (IPC) Algorithm for Link Scheduling in IEEE 802.15.6 Based WBANs

“…Channel Hopping: Channel hopping is used to switch to a randomly chosen frequency out of allowed set of frequencies after a specific amount of time according to a predefined sequence known to both sender and receiver. An enhanced channel hopping scheme is presented in [37] to evaluate coexistence performance for WBANs. The authors in [38] proposed a fuzzy logic-based interference detection and mitigation scheme using channel hopping.…”

Hybrid Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for WBANs with Inter-WBAN Interference Mitigation

“…Moreover, the WBAN transmission may be at risk under the cross-technology interference from other devices in a real scenario. In Reference [ 12 ], the joint of control routing and transmitting power is applied by selecting good-quality links to reduce interference at the WBAN. Furthermore, the cognitive radio technique is implemented in the WBAN to reduce interference, in which the coordinator of the WBAN detects the interference level in the working channel and switches to another channel [ 25 ].…”

“…The high-load traffic at the sensor nodes may cause collisions in intra-WBAN transmission, resulting in the degradation of network throughput. Currently, to cope with the need for higher network throughput, multi-channel MAC protocols are considered to increase the network throughput in various wireless networks such as wireless sensor networks, ad hoc networks, cognitive radio networks, and WBANs [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ].…”