Cross-Technology Interference Mitigation in Body Area Networks: An Optimization Approach

In recent years, wearable devices and wireless body area networks have gained momentum as a means to monitor people's behavior and simplify their interaction with the surrounding environment, thus representing a key element of the body-to-body networking (BBN) paradigm. Within this paradigm, several transmission technologies, such as 802.11 and 802.15.4, that share the same unlicensed band (namely, the industrial, scientific, and medical band) coexist, dramatically increasing the level of interference and, in turn, negatively affecting network performance. In this paper, we analyze the cross-technology interference (CTI) caused by the utilization of different transmission technologies that share the same radio spectrum. We formulate an optimization model that considers internal interference, as well as CTI to mitigate the overall level of interference within the system, explicitly taking into account node mobility. We further develop three heuristic approaches to efficiently solve the interference mitigation problem in large-scale network scenarios. Finally, we propose a protocol to compute the solution that minimizes CTI in a distributed fashion. Numerical results show that the proposed heuristics represent efficient and practical alternatives to the optimal solution for solving the CTI mitigation (CTIM) problem in large-scale BBN scenarios.