Performance improvement of the wireless body area network (WBAN) under interferences

WBAN offers promising and innovative applications that enhance the quality of services provided by the healthcare system; it improves patient's quality of life and saves his lives in many situations. WBAN is composed of tiny medical devices on or implanted in the human body and continuously monitors patient's health. The wireless interface and the mobility of the body network enable easier, practical and less cost applications. WBAN provides uninterrupted distantly health monitoring of patient while he is doing his daily activity and it expect to efficiently deliver emergency collected vital signs to the concerned medical entity. However, the high contention level inside the WBAN, the presence of external collocated wireless network and the use of a shared medium, invoke packet collisions and thus affect the communication quality and reliability of the WBAN. Our goal in this article is to analyse the interference's problem of the WBAN based IEEE 802.15.4 protocol in the presence of Wi-Fi transmitters. We opt also for an adequate simulator and configurable mobility model to investigate different effects of the WBAN density as well as the increase number of Wi-Fi transmitters on the performance of the WBAN. We finally propose a simple, no cost and convenient parameters adjustment method to improve the WBAN's capacity, packet delivery, packet transmission and packet delay.