An interference mitigation MAC protocol for wireless body area network

As a kind of short distance wireless communication network, wireless body area network (WBAN) can be widely used in wireless medical, motion detection, personal entertainment and other scenes. However, the existence of interference seriously affects the performance of WBAN, which results in packet loss and the increase of energy consumption and delay. It is worth noting that multi-channel MAC protocols can mitigate interference by avoiding multiple nodes using the same or similar spectrum resources. In this paper, we propose an interference mitigation MAC protocol (IMMAC) to improve the performance of throughput and delay. Specifically, we first present a channel mapping mechanism to clarify the state of each channel and mitigate the effects of interference. Considering the unfairness between high and low priorities, we thus describe a channel selection strategy to improve the transmission efficiency of different priority traffics. Moreover, we put forward a novel collision avoidance mechanism to reduce the probability of packets collision. Simulation results show that IMMAC can reduce the delay and improve the throughput and channel utilization significantly.