  The performance of wireless body area networks (WBANs) may be degraded due to
co-channel interference, i.e., when sensors of different coexisting WBANs
transmit at the same time-slots using the same channel. In this paper, we
exploit the 16 channels available in the 2.4 GHz unlicensed international band
of ZIGBEE, and propose a distributed scheme that opts to avoid interference
through channel to time-slot hopping based on Latin rectangles, DAIL. In DAIL,
each WBAN's coordinator picks a Latin rectangle whose rows are ZIGBEE channels
and columns are time-slots of its superframe. Subsequently, it assigns a unique
symbol to each sensor; this latter forms a transmission pattern according to
distinct positions of its symbol in the rectangle, such that collisions among
different transmissions of coexisting WBANs are minimized. We further present
an analytical model that derives bounds on the collision probability of each
sensor's transmission in the network. In addition, the efficiency of DAIL in
interference mitigation has been validated by simulations.
