A Hybrid Channel Access Scheme for Coexistence Mitigation in IEEE 802.15.4-Based WBAN

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a communication technology, which aims providing both medical and consumer electronics services through sensor devices in, on, or around a human body. Due to the absence of the IEEE 802.15.6-based RF modules, the IEEE 802.15.4, a typical low-power communication technology of which requirements are similar, is considered to implement WBANs. In the case where a lot of WBANs coexist, meanwhile, collisions and signal attenuations may lead to their communication performance degradation. However, the IEEE 802.15.4 does not provide any solutions to solve coexistence problems, and thus, coexistence mitigation schemes for the IEEE 802.15.4-based WBANs are necessary. In this paper, we perform preliminary experiments to identify aspects of coexistence problem among the coexisting IEEE 802.15.4-based WBANs. Based on the results of preliminary experiments, we also propose a hybrid channel access scheme to mitigate coexistence problems in WBANs. The proposed scheme can be classified into two phases. In the first phase, the proposed scheme provides probabilistic collision avoidance on the contention-free period. When the pre-defined requirements of reliability cannot be satisfied with performing the first phase, the proposed scheme performs the second phase, which helps to mitigate collision or interference through changing channel access method. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, we implement our scheme and perform experiments by comparing with an IEEE 802.15.4-based WBAN.