A Dynamic Channel Allocation Protocol for Medical Environment under Multiple Base Stations

Health monitoring over wireless networks is at the same time increasingly popular and a challenging task. In fact, in a medical environment, the high density of wireless devices leads to an extensive amount of co-channel interferences, imposing risk to patients' life due to poor network performance (e.g. high latency and packet loss rate). In this work, we present a DynamiC distributed Channel Allocation (DCCA) protocol. DCCA takes into account the existence of co-located wireless body area networks (WBANs) and multiple base stations in a single medical environment. In other words, DCCA avoids co-channel interference and offers workload balancing among base stations by dynamically allocating channels based on a greedy solution to the graph-coloring problem. Simulation results from medical environment scenarios show that DCCA improves the quality of communication when compared with other representative frequency- allocation protocol. On average, DCCA increases 30% the network goodput and reduces 40% network latency.