Patent ID: 8902832

Claim:
A method for coordinating access to a wireless medium among multiple co-located body area networks (BANs), each BAN including a plurality of slave devices and a plurality of master devices arranged in a two-tier architecture, the method comprising, detecting, by a master device of a first BAN, at least one alien BAN using beacons received from at least one co-located BAN, wherein an alien BAN is a BAN where a round start time (RST) is misaligned with a RST of the first BAN; recording a RST offset between the first BAN and the at least one alien BAN; based on the RST offset, determining which of the first BAN and the at least one alien BAN is an initiator BAN and which is a target BAN; and realigning, by all master devices belonging to the initiator BAN, the RST of the initiator BAN with the RST of the target BAN.