A Robust Beacon Scheduling Scheme for Coexistence Between UWB Based WBAN and WiMedia Networks

Ultra wideband (UWB) technology has emerged as a solution for the wireless interface between medical sensors and a personal server in future telemedicine systems. The WiMedia Alliance has specified a distributed medium access control (D-MAC) protocol based on UWB for high-rate wireless personal area networks (WPANs). Also, the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for wireless body area networks (WBANs) allows that devices for healthcare and lifestyle applications are placed around and within the body. However, current WBAN devices cannot coexist with other home network systems or WPAN systems and cannot share wireless channel with the existing WiMedia devices, efficiently. Existing researches about coexistence are not suitable for WiMedia MAC protocol based on distributed architecture, since they focused on MAC protocol based on centralized architecture. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a robust beacon scheduling scheme for coexistence between UWB based WBAN and WiMedia networks. Using proposed scheme, WBAN devices can share the resource more efficiently with WiMedia devices and exchange data frames through the reserved BAN period duration.