Inter-user interference deteriorates reliable communication in body sensor networks (BSNs) when multiple BSNs are transmitting simultaneously in close proximity to each other. Stochastic geometry provides a natural way of modeling the placement of interferers, by averaging over all potential geometrical realizations for the interferers. This paper presents a stochastic geometry analysis of inter-user interference in IEEE 802.15.6 BSNs.

The analysis evaluates the performance of BSNs in terms of outage probability and spatial throughput. The effects of medium access control (MAC) design in IEEE 802.15.6 are considered where both contention-free and contention-based MAC operations co-exist in the BSN deployment area. Based on the analysis, the interference detection range is optimized to achieve the maximum spatial throughput while the reliable transmission requirement is met. Moreover, insights are provided on the design of MAC for BSNs depending on the specific BSN applications.