As wireless body area networks (WBANs) become a key element in electronic healthcare (e-healthcare) systems, the coexistence of multiple mobile WBANs is becoming an issue. The network performance is negatively affected by the unpredictable movement of the human body. In such an environment, inter-WBAN interference can be caused by the overlapping transmission range of nearby WBANs. We propose a link scheduling algorithm with interference prediction (LSIP) for multiple mobile WBANs, which allows multiple mobile WBANs to transmit at the same time without causing inter-WBAN interference. In the LSIP, a superframe includes the contention access phase using carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) and the scheduled phase using time division multiple access (TDMA) for non-interfering nodes and interfering nodes, respectively. For interference prediction, we define a parameter called interference duration as the duration during which disparate WBANs interfere with each other. The Bayesian model is used to estimate and classify the interference using a signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and the number of neighboring WBANs. The simulation results show that the proposed LSIP algorithm improves the packet delivery ratio and throughput significantly with acceptable delay.
Keywords: interference; interference prediction; link scheduling; medium access control; mobility; wireless body area network.