Fairness-aware radio resource management for medical interoperability between WBAN and WLAN

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) in the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) bands have been increasingly adopted for various medical applications. Due to the shared nature of the ISM bands, when a WBAN coexists with a wireless local area network (WLAN), performance of WBAN may significantly degrade because of asymmetric attributes between WBAN and WLAN such as transmit power and response time. In this paper, we propose a novel channel access protocol for achieving effective channel sharing in the aspect of efficiency and fairness, which adaptively controls the contention window size of WLAN based on the delay information of WBAN. Our extensive simulation results for real-time electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring show that the proposed scheme can guarantee the required quality of service of WBAN while insignificant degradation of WLAN performance.