On constructing interference free schedule for coexisting wireless body area networks using distributed coloring algorithm

In this paper, we study the interference mitigation scheme in a network with multiple co-located wireless body area networks (WBANs). Each WBAN consists of a coordinator and multiple sensor nodes. Interference happens when multiple nodes transmit to their coordinators at the same time. Our objective is twofold: firstly we want to construct an interference-free time slot schedule for all the nodes in the network; secondly we want to minimize the transmission cycle of all the nodes. Towards such goal, we map different time slots to distinct colors and propose a WBAN distributed coloring (DC) algorithm to find a color assignment for each node in the network. To implement the algorithm, the coordinators need to exchange messages for multiple rounds to achieve a non-conflict coloring scheme distributively. The simulation results show that on average the proposed algorithm has a significant performance gain over existing schemes.