Coexistence, and hence interference mitigation, across multiple wireless bodyarea networks (WBANs) is an important problem as WBANs become more pervasive.Here, two-hop relay-assisted cooperative communications using opportunisticrelaying (OR) is proposed for enhancement of coexistence for WBANs. Suitabletime division multiple access (TDMA) schemes are employed for both intra-WBANand inter-WBANs access protocols. To emulate actual conditions of WBAN use,extensive on-body and inter-body "everyday" channel measurements are employed.In addition, a realistic inter-WBAN channel model is simulated to investigatethe effect of body shadowing and hub location on WBAN performance in enablingcoexistence. When compared with single-link communications, it is found thatopportunistic relaying can provide significant improvement, in terms ofsignal-to-interference+noise ratio (SINR), to outage probability and levelcrossing rate (LCR) into outages. However, average outage duration (AOD) is notaffected. In addition a lognormal distribution shows a better fit to receivedSINR when the channel coherence time is small, and a Nakagami-m distribution isa more common fit when the channel is more stable. According to the estimatedSINR distributions, theoretical outage probability, LCR and AOD are shown tomatch the empirical results well.
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