Scheduling Transmissions of Coexisting Wireless Body Area Networks Using Minimum Weight Match

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is extensively being used for ubiquitous health care monitoring. Coexisting multiple WBANs could possibly suffer from high interference and thus an appropriate scheduling scheme is desirable to improve network throughput for interfering nodes. The received Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) from the sensors in the overlapped region of two or more WBANs which use the same transmitting frequency drops. This decrease is an indicator of inter-WBAN interference. Hence, we propose a scheduling algorithm which assigns the node with minimum SINR to first available transmission slot and so on. Thus, the nodes which suffer maximum interference are given higher priority to transmit in the revised Time division multiple access (TDMA) schedules. The local coordinator of each WBAN exchange messages with the interfering WBAN's coordinator and then tries to suppress interference by creating a new TDMA schedule for interfering nodes. Results obtained using simulations are encouraging as they indicate that minimum weight match scheduling can improve the packet drop rate and thus enhance the network performance.