A lightweight distributed scheme for mitigating inter-user interference in body sensor networks

Inter-user interference deteriorates reliable communication in body sensor networks (BSNs) when multiple BSNs are transmitting simultaneously in close proximity to each other. This paper presents a lightweight and distributed inter-user interference mitigation (IIM) scheme, that can be easily integrated with the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol stack. The proposed scheme takes into consideration the generic property of low channel utilization in BSNs and enables affected BSNs to adaptively reschedule their transmission time or switch channels. Based on the detected information from neighboring BSNs, BSNs reschedule their transmissions in a distributed and coordinated manner, so that wireless channels can be effectively utilized by multiple BSNs. Moreover, the IIM scheme is performed only when the performance of the BSN is degraded to an unacceptable level due to severe interference to reduce the rescheduling cost. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the network throughput by 18% and reduces the energy consumption by 22% as compared with the existing beacon schedule scheme.