Analysing the Impact of Mutual Interference in Body Area Networks

The development of electronics and short-range communications gave rise to smart healthcare systems known as body area networks (BAN), to record the vital signs of patients for diagnosis. However, these systems may be located in dense areas, where several networks operate next to each other. Hence, interference occurs, which can adversely affect their proper functioning. Before proceeding with interference reduction or avoidance techniques, it is very important to first analyze this problem under different contexts and scenarios, to better understand it. The aim of this paper is to study the impact of inter-ban interference in body area networks on overall energy consumption, under two different contexts: when the inter-ban distance is varying, and when the amount of nodes in surrounding BANs increases. For this purpose, the two following scenarios are considered: In the first scenario, the distance between two adjacent BANs is decreasing from 6 to 2 m, and the overall energy consumption of the BAN of interest is evaluated. On the other hand, the second scenario highlights the impact of the amount of nodes in an interfering BAN on the overall energy consumption. Simulations were conducted using Castalia 3.3 software. The obtained results showed that when two BANs are located next to each other, if the distance between them becomes smaller, or the amount of nodes in the interfering BAN exceeds that of the reference one, the energy consumption of the BAN of interest will increase, due to the highly experienced interference levels, especially at high data rates.