Scheduling schemes for interference suppression in healthcare sensor networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have the potential for extensive use in health care monitoring. To provide optimum network utilization, it is important to efficiently schedule multiple co-existing WBANs which could possibly suffer from high degree of interference. A graceful coexistence can be feasible by appropriately scheduling transmissions from different WBANs. In this paper, we use a recent standard of IEEE 802.15.6 (TG6), which has been finalized in May 2012, to address the problems of intra and inter-WBAN interference. This standard offers several advantages for medical applications as compared to IEEE 802.15.4 which has been previously adopted for numerous healthcare applications. In this paper, we propose a QoS based MAC scheduling approach to avoid inter-WBAN interference and introduce a fuzzy inference engine for intra-WBAN scheduling so as to avoid interference within WBANs.