Opportunistic spectrum allocation for interference mitigation amongst coexisting wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are seen as the enabling technology for developing new generations of medical applications, such as remote health monitoring. As such it is expected that WBANs will predominantly transport mission-critical and delay sensitive data. A key strategy towards building a reliable WBAN is to ensure such networks are highly immune to interference. To achieve this, new and intelligent wireless spectrum allocation strategies are required not only to avoid interference, but also to make best-use of the limited available spectrum. This article presents a new spectrum allocation scheme referred to as Smart Channel Assignment (SCA), which maximizes the resource usage and transmission speed by deploying a partially-orthogonal channel assignment scheme between coexisting WBANs as well as offering a convenient tradeoff among spectral reuse efficiency, transmission rate, and outage. Detailed analytical studies verify that the proposed SCA strategy is robust to variations in channel conditions, increase in sensor node-density within each WBAN, and an increase in number of coexisting WBANs.