Coexistence Issues for Wireless Body Area Networks at 2.45 GHz

This paper deals with coexistence issues that may arise for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) operating at the 2.45 GHz ISM band. Two different sources of interference are considered: IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) and IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee). Firstly, these interfering networks are characterized both in the frequency and in the time domains. Then, the coexistence of a WBAN with these interfering systems is assessed. We consider a WBAN as composed of wearable nodes that communicate with an on-body coordinator and we evaluate the achievable performance for three different physical layers and two different Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance algorithms.