Abstract: Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) consists of various biomedical sensors to monitor different vital signs of patient’s health. MAC layer is responsible for scheduling data transmissions, and coordinating nodes’ channel access that avoids an possible collisions during data transmissions. The coexistence of multiple WBANs introduce interferences and increases the probability of collisions. A cognitive MAC, which utilizes the concept of cognitive radio, is proposed to optimally assign unique timeslots to interfered sensor nodes using Hungarian minimum matching algorithm to mitigate inter-WBAN interference. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated, analyzed, and compared with the standard MAC protocol using different performance metrics and scenarios. From the simulation results, we show the effectiveness of our proposed protocol in terms of throughput, latency, and energy consumption.

Keywords: WBAN; IEEE 802.15.4; MAC; Inter-Interference Mitigation