Inter-user interference in body sensor networks: A case study in moderate-scale deployment in hospital environment

Abstract

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) enable continuous and remote health monitoring in medical applications. In realistic deployments, inter-user interference is the major cause that deteriorates reliable data transmissions in BSNs when multiple BSNs are transmitting simultaneously in close proximity to one another. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of BSNs in terms of Packet Error Rate (PER) in the presence of such inter-user interference. Our study considers multiple factors that affect the BSN performance, including BSN density, traffic load, and transmission power in a realistic moderate-scale deployment case in hospital. Our results show that with 20% duty cycle, only 68.5% of data transmission can achieve the targeted reliability requirement (PER<0.05) even in the off-peak period. We then suggest inter-user interference mitigation schemes based on the performance results in specific BSN deployment scenarios. © 2012 IEEE.