Joint Energy Harvesting and Internetwork Interference Mitigation amongst Coexisting Wireless Body Area Networks

This paper investigates simultaneous transfer of information and energy for interference mitigation amongst multiple coexisting Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). We propose to utilize interference that falls into the network as a source of energy, which is mainly discarded in conventional interference mitigation schemes. More specifically, in each time slot, a single sensor node is scheduled to receive information whilst the remaining sensor nodes opportunistically harvest the ambient radio frequency energy. We develop a novel opportunistic scheduling scheme, which offers a significantly high network lifetime through a tradeoff between a sensor's spectral efficiency and average amount of energy harvested. Simulation results show that the proposed energy harvesting with smart channel allocation (E-SCA) scheme can achieve optimal spatial reuse and good energy harvesting. We also show that the proposed approach is robust to variations in channel conditions, density of sensor nodes in each WBAN and increase in number of coexisting WBANs.