Performance of Piconet Co-Existence Schemes in Wireless Body Area Networks

Coexistence of multiple wireless body area networks (WBAN) is a very challenging problem because each piconet can have a large number of sensors and their movement is unpredictable. Moreover, suitable global coordination schemes do not exist as there is no natural choice of coordinator between piconets. Adaptive schemes that work well with low-occupancy channels, such as listen before transmit, are not a wise global solution because of the potential for high levels of traffic in any one area. In this paper we investigate the performance of three classic multiple-access schemes - namely TDMA, FDMA and CDMA - for (inter-network) piconet coexistence. We first consider a theoretical analysis of these schemes and then simulate each scheme using real-world interference measurements. It is found that co-channel interference could significantly degrade system performance if left unchecked, and that TDMA and FDMA are better choices than CDMA in terms of co-channel interference mitigation.