Self-organization amongst multiple co-existing wireless body area networks

This paper presents a novel primitive for self-organization amongst multiple coexisting Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). It follows a biologically inspired approach based on the theory of pulse-coupled oscillators. Our proposal allows for coexisting WBANs to use delayed information from previous transmissions to adjust to a collision-free TDMA schedule amongst each other for future communications. Most importantly, it does not require a global coordinator as all nodes achieve synchronization in a completely self-organized manner. Simulation results show that our protocol achieves a significantly fast convergence time despite little information from its coexisting networks. Moreover, the proposed approach is shown to be robust to variations in channel conditions, density of sensor nodes within each network and the number of coexisting WBANs. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed protocol using the NS-2 simulator.