Conservation-Oriented Resource Scheduling for Interference Mitigation in Dynamic Coexisting Wireless Body Area Networks

The severe interferences can significantly degrade the comprehensive performance of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). However, current interference mitigation solutions cannot accommodate to the network scale diversity and cannot guarantee light enough transmission conflicts. In this article, we propose a conservation-oriented resource scheduling (CORS) strategy to address the current problems. For ordinary data transmissions, we design an economical resource allocation scheme based on a specific Latin square, which is divided into several groups to economically allocate channels and timeslots for nodes, resulting in great resource saving and interference reduction. For data retransmissions, we design a differentiated resource allocation scheme based a specific hash function, in which a large module is designed to obtain significant difference of retransmission timeslots for different nodes, resulting in further interference reduction. CORS has three main characteristics: broad application range due to its adaptation to different scales of WBANs, high network reliability resulting from its low-frequency transmission conflicts, and high channel utilization derived from its Latin square grouping. Extensive simulation results show that our strategy has distinct performance advantages in terms of five metrics: average packet loss rate, average delay, average throughput, average power consumption, and channel utilization.