A Self-Organized Dynamic Clustering Method and Its Multiple Access Mechanism for Multiple WBANs

Due to its wide application range and attractive features, wireless body area networks (WBANs) is considered as a revolutionary technology, which is envisaged to change how people manage and think about their health and their life styles. In this paper, we propose a self-organized dynamic clustering (SDC) method and its multiple access mechanism to mitigate the interference and improve the QoS in multiple WBANs environment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that focuses on the spectrum allocation for multiple WBANs. We borrow the concepts of cell and cluster from cellular networks to allocate the channels for different WBANs. The clustering is self-organized to improve the data transmission for intra-WBAN communication by the information exchange via inter-WBAN communication. Additionally, based on the cluster architecture, an inter-WBAN relaying (IWR) protocol for packets with low privacy or high reliability is also investigated. The simulation results show that SDC has better signal to interference ratio compared with existing framework. Besides, SDC and IWR also provide better QoS performance in terms of higher data packet delivery ratio and lower packet delay.