Frequency adaptation for interference mitigation in IEEE 802.15.4-based mobile body sensor networks

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is an interesting technology for use in mobile body sensor networks (MBSN), where entire networks of sensors are carried by humans. In many environments the sensor nodes experience external interference – for example, when the BSN is operated in the 2.4 GHz ISM band and the human moves in a densely populated city, it will likely experience WiFi interference, with a quickly changing “interference landscape”. In this paper we consider whether frequency adaptation, to be carried out by the BSN, provides performance gains in such an environment. We investigate a range of adaptation schemes and assess their performance both through simulations and experimentally. We furthermore consider one particular problem caused by frequency adaptation: the problem of orphaned devices. We provide simulation results suggesting that the problem indeed is noticeable, but hard to mitigate.