A WLAN and ZigBee coexistence mechanism for wearable health monitoring system

The world is approaching a crisis: unprecedented population aging, rising chronic disease, and escalating health care cost. This calls for a new health care paradigm that embraces the wireless technologies. However, the integration of wireless technologies, such as IEEE 802.15.4 based ZigBee and IEEE 802.11b based Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) in the wearable health monitoring system is aggravated with significant interference issue. Existing coexistence mechanisms can not eradicate interference effectively. This degrades the performance of wearable health monitoring system significantly. Thus, we propose a collaborative coexistence scheme based on dynamic Guaranteed Time Slot (GTS) allocation with protective mechanism for the wearable health monitoring system.