A lightweight inter-user interference mitigation method in Body Sensor Networks

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) enable continuous and remote health monitoring in medical applications. Inter-user interference is the major cause that deteriorates the reliable data transmission in BSNs when multiple BSNs are transmitting simultaneously in close proximity to one another. This paper presents an inter-user interference mitigation (IIM) method, which enables BSNs to adaptively reschedule their transmissions or switch to another channel in a distributed manner based on the detected information from neighboring BSNs. By taking advantage of the general property of the low channel utilization of BSNs in typical medical applications, the proposed IIM method increases system utilization and thus alleviates inter-user interference. In addition, our IIM method operates in a distributed manner without the need of extra infrastructure as compared to other approaches. In this paper, we describe the detailed design of the IIM method, and provide performance comparisons through simulations. The simulation results indicate that with the proposed IIM method, the network throughput is improved by 30% on average, and the energy consumption for data transmission is reduced by 16%.