Proposal of a hierarchical topology and spatial reuse superframe for enhancing throughput of a cluster‐based WBAN

A cluster topology was proposed with the assumption of zero noise to improve the performance of wireless body area networks (WBANs). However, in WBANs, the transmission power should be reduced as low as possible to avoid the effect of electromagnetic waves on the human body and to extend the lifetime of a battery. Therefore, in this work, we consider a bit error rate for a cluster‐based WBAN and analyze the performance of the system while the transmission of sensors and cluster headers (CHs) is controlled. Moreover, a hierarchical topology is proposed for the cluster‐based WBAN to further improve the throughput of the system; this proposed system is called as the hierarchical cluster WBAN. The hierarchical cluster WBAN is combined with a transmission control scheme, that is, complete control, spatial reuse superframe, to increase the throughput. The proposed system is analyzed and evaluated based on several factors of the system model, such as signal‐to‐noise ratio, number of clusters, and number of sensors. The calculation result indicates that the proposed hierarchical cluster WBAN outperforms the cluster‐based WBAN in all analyzed scenarios.     

A novel nest-based scheduling method for mobile wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) comprise various sensors to monitor and collect various vital signals, such as blood pressure, pulse, heartbeat, body temperature, and blood sugar. A dense and mobile WBAN often suffers from interference, which causes serious problems, such as wasting energy and degrading throughput. In reality, not all of the sensors in WBAN need to be active at the same time. Therefore, they can be divided into different groups so that each group works in turn to avoid interference. In this paper, a Nest-Based WBAN Scheduling (NBWS) algorithm is proposed to cluster sensors of the same types in a single or multiple WBANs into different groups to avoid interference. Particularly, we borrow the graph coloring theory to schedule all groups to work using a Time Division for Multimodal Sensor (TDMS) group scheduling model. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed NBWS algorithm performs better in terms of frequency of collisions, transmission delay, system throughput, and energy consumption compared to the counterpart methods.     

无线体域网资源分配研究综述

无线体域网旨在提供实时的、无处不在的人体监测来执行独立的早期预测、诊断和身体跟踪响应的护理,并日渐成为研究和应用的热点。随着WBAN在人类日常生活中的重要性日趋突出,专用于无线体域网的标准IEEE802.15.6于2012年颁布。本文主要针对多个体域网网间和单个体域网内部的资源分配进行研究,考虑WBAN的异质性以及传感器节点的异质性,同时对体域网资源分配的研究现状和不足进行分析和总结。最后,分析了无线体域网资源分配需要解决的问题和未来研究的方向。     

Priority Aware and Spectrum Efficient Scheduling of Co-existing Wireless Body Area Networks

Real-time continuous and remote health monitoring has become widespread due to the developments in Wireless body area networks (WBANs). Based on the criticality of health data to be transmitted, regular healthcare data and critical emergency health data must be provided differential service. In this paper, we consider the beyond WBAN communication in a system comprising multiple WBANs with different quality of service (QoS) requirements and multiple access points (APs), and propose two hybrid approaches for resource allocation. In the first approach, the AP association to the WBANs and channel allocation to the APs are done jointly and is modelled as an optimization problem, which is computationally complex and it also requires global network information. In order to reduce the involvement of APs in making decisions for resource allocations of WBANs, the problem is reformulated as a Stackelberg game with price update, which guarantees QoS of the critical users. A learning based algorithm, namely distributed learning for Pareto optimality, is used by the normal users, in this second approach. The performance of both the proposed approaches are evaluated and compared, in terms of the throughput of the critical and normal users as well as the QoS guarantee of the critical users.

     

Fairness-aware radio resource management for medical interoperability between WBAN and WLAN

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) in the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) bands have been increasingly adopted for various medical applications. Due to the shared nature of the ISM bands, when a WBAN coexists with a wireless local area network (WLAN), performance of WBAN may significantly degrade because of asymmetric attributes between WBAN and WLAN such as transmit power and response time. In this paper, we propose a novel channel access protocol for achieving effective channel sharing in the aspect of efficiency and fairness, which adaptively controls the contention window size of WLAN based on the delay information of WBAN. Our extensive simulation results for real-time electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring show that the proposed scheme can guarantee the required quality of service of WBAN while insignificant degradation of WLAN performance.     

A survey of wireless technologies coexistence in WBAN: analysis and open research issues

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is the most convenient, cost-effective, accurate, and non-invasive technology for e-health monitoring. The performance of WBAN may be disturbed when coexisting with other wireless networks. Accordingly, this paper provides a comprehensive study and in-depth analysis of coexistence issues and interference mitigation solutions in WBAN technologies. A thorough survey of state-of-the art research in WBAN coexistence issues is conducted. The survey classified, discussed, and compared the studies according to the parameters used to analyze the coexistence problem. Solutions suggested by the studies are then classified according to the followed techniques and concomitant shortcomings are identified. Moreover, the coexistence problem in WBAN technologies is mathematically analyzed and formulas are derived for the probability of successful channel access for different wireless technologies with the coexistence of an interfering network. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted using OPNET with several real-life scenarios to evaluate the impact of coexistence interference on different WBAN technologies. In particular, three main WBAN wireless technologies are considered: IEEE 802.15.6, IEEE 802.15.4, and low-power WiFi. The mathematical analysis and the simulation results are discussed and the impact of interfering network on the different wireless technologies is compared and analyzed. The results show that an interfering network (e.g., standard WiFi) has an impact on the performance of WBAN and may disrupt its operation. In addition, using low-power WiFi for WBANs is investigated and proved to be a feasible option compared to other wireless technologies.     

A survey on wireless body area networks

The increasing use of wireless networks and the constant miniaturization of electrical devices has empowered the development of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). In these networks various sensors are attached on clothing or on the body or even implanted under the skin. The wireless nature of the network and the wide variety of sensors offer numerous new, practical and innovative applications to improve health care and the Quality of Life. The sensors of a WBAN measure for example the heartbeat, the body temperature or record a prolonged electrocardiogram. Using a WBAN, the patient experiences a greater physical mobility and is no longer compelled to stay in the hospital. This paper offers a survey of the concept of Wireless Body Area Networks. First, we focus on some applications with special interest in patient monitoring. Then the communication in a WBAN and its positioning between the different technologies is discussed. An overview of the current research on the physical layer, existing MAC and network protocols is given. Further, cross layer and quality of service is discussed. As WBANs are placed on the human body and often transport private data, security is also considered. An overview of current and past projects is given. Finally, the open research issues and challenges are pointed out.     

SDN‐based wireless body area network routing algorithm for healthcare architecture

The use of wireless body area networks (WBANs) in healthcare applications has made it convenient to monitor both health personnel and patient status continuously in real time through wearable wireless sensor nodes. However, the heterogeneous and complex network structure of WBANs has some disadvantages in terms of control and management. The software‐defined network (SDN) approach is a promising technology that defines a new design and management approach for network communications. In order to create more flexible and dynamic network structures in WBANs, this study uses the SDN approach. For this, a WBAN architecture based on the SDN approach with a new energy‐aware routing algorithm for healthcare architecture is proposed. To develop a more flexible architecture, a controller that manages all HUBs is designed. The proposed architecture is modeled using the Riverbed Modeler software for performance analysis. The simulation results show that the SDN‐based structure meets the service quality requirements and shows superior performance in terms of energy consumption, throughput, successful transmission rate, and delay parameters according to the traditional routing approach.     

Impact of priority differentiation on the bridged WBAN/WLAN healthcare networks

In this work, we develop a prioritized bridging mechanism between the IEEE 802.15.6‐based wireless body area networks (WBANs) and the IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA)‐based wireless local area network (WLAN) to convey the medical data to the medical center. We map the eight WBAN user priorities (UPs) into the four WLAN access categories (ACs) to provide the required quality of service and prioritization for the health variables generated by the WBAN nodes. By assignment of WBAN UPs with default medium access control parameters to eight different medical data streams and under the presence of ordinary nodes, we investigate the impact of WLAN AC differentiation by arbitrary inter‐frame space (AIFS) and contention window (CW) on performance of medical and regular nodes’ data streams. The results of this work indicate that the AC differentiation by AIFS outperforms the differentiation by CW in the sense that it does not deteriorate the end‐to‐end delay of relayed WBAN traffic and ordinary WLAN traffic.Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

TF‐CPABE: An efficient and secure data communication with policy updating in wireless body area networks

The major challenge in wireless body area networks (WBAN) is setting up a protected communication between data consumers and a body area network controller while meeting the security and privacy requirements. This paper proposes efficient and secure data communication in WBANs using a Twofish symmetric algorithm and ciphertext‐policy attribute‐based encryption with constant size ciphertext; in addition, the proposed scheme incorporates policy updating to update access policies. To the best of the author's knowledge, policy updating in WBAN has not been studied in earlier works. The proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of message size, energy consumption, and computation cost, and the results are compared with those of existing schemes. The result shows that the proposed method can achieve higher efficiency than conventional methods.     

Priority-guaranteed MAC protocol for emerging wireless body area networks

The newly emerging wireless body area networks (WBANs) are intended to support both medical applications and consumer electronic (CE) applications. These two types of applications present diverse service requirements. To satisfy both medical and CE applications with a uniform medium access control (MAC) protocol becomes a new challenge for the WBAN. Addressing this problem, a priority-guaranteed MAC protocol is proposed in this paper. In this protocol, data channels are separated from control channels to support collision-free high data rate communication for CE applications. Priority-specific control channels are adopted to provide priority guarantee to life-critical medical applications. Traffic-specific data channels are deployed to improve resource efficiency and latency performance. Moreover, in order to further minimize energy consumption and access latency, an asynchronous wakeup trigger mode is proposed as an enhancement to the priority traffic. Monte Carlo simulations are carried out for performance evaluation. As compared with IEEE 802.15.4 MAC and its improved versions, the priority-guaranteed MAC demonstrates significant improvements on throughput and energy efficiency with a tolerable penalty on latency performance of bursty traffic in CE applications. Therefore, the customized priority-guaranteed MAC satisfies the service requirements of WBAN by making tradeoff among the performances of different applications.     

On the Security of “Secure and Lightweight Authentication with Key Agreement for Smart Wearable Systems”

Over the years, the performance of devices used to gather sensitive medical information about individuals has increased substantially. These include implanted devices in the body, placed on or around the body, creating a Wireless body area network. Security and privacy have been a greater concern over a period of time due to the sensitive nature of the data collected and transmitted by the network. It has been noticed that various techniques have been applied to secure the data and provide privacy in WBANs but with a tradeoff of execution overhead. Although the latest available anonymous authentication schemes provide privacy and security but due to the limited computation capacity of WBAN devices, these schemes show greater time cost for authentication and consume more processing time. We review two latest anonymous authentication schemes for the WBAN environment in terms of computation cost. These two schemes provide anonymous authentication and use encryption to secure the data and ensure privacy. Then we analyze a recent lightweight authentication scheme proposed for wearable devices which provides anonymity and privacy along with security with very low computation cost. This scheme uses hash functions in order to obtain authentication and anonymity and doesn’t use encryption in the authentication process. This scheme is not proposed for the WBAN environment, but it can be applied on the WBAN environment with necessary variations. The comparison of these available schemes shows clearly that the computation cost is considerably decreased by applying the latest authentication scheme in the WBAN environment. We propose a new authentication scheme for the WBAN environment based on the light-weight scheme proposed for wearable devices. The detailed analysis shows that our proposed scheme minimizes the computation cost and maintains the privacy and security along with anonymous authentication.

     

Security analysis of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard

A wireless body area network (WBAN) consists of low‐power devices that are capable of sensing, processing, and wireless communication. WBANs can be used in many applications such as military, ubiquitous health care, entertainment, and sport. The IEEE Std 802.15.6‐2012 is the latest international standard for WBAN. In this paper, we scrutinize the security structure of the IEEE 802.15.6‐2012 standard and perform a security analysis on the cryptographic protocols in the standard. We show that some protocols have subtle security problems and are vulnerable to different attacks. Such vulnerabilities neutralize the security provisions in the standard specifically for medical applications that deal with sensitive information and security problems can be life‐threatening. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interference‐aware MAC scheduling and admission control for multiple mobile WBANs used in healthcare monitoring

In this paper, we address the problem of interference when multiple time division multiple access‐based wireless body area networks (WBANs) come in the proximity of one another. We propose a simple solution that creates common non‐conflicting schedule between these interfering WBANs. Our proposed scheme allows the reuse of maximum possible time slots among WBANs that are two‐hop neighbors of one another. A flow admission control scheme is applied to control the flows during the period of interference. We show that the percentage of flows admitted because of flow control decreases with the increase in the network size and flow rate. We simulated a scenario where WBANs move randomly within a simulation area with a certain speed and meet at a particular point. We show that the signal to interference noise ratio (SINR) value of WBANs changes as long as they are within the transmission range of one another. Also, we show that the exchanges of common schedule (which is dependent on the number of times the SINR value drops below the threshold) are required in order to improve the packet delivery ratio in WBANs. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Efficient Data Delivery Scheme in WBAN to Deal with Shadow Effect due to Postural Mobility

The body movement and change in posture exhibit high mobility in sensor nodes which causes shadowing in the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). Due to this, the connectivity between the nodes in WBAN is affected which further causes failure in data delivery. This article presents a MAC protocol in WBAN to deal with the problem of data delivery due to body movement and postural mobility. It uses an Improved Initial Centroid K-means clustering technique for classification of various human body postures followed by back propagation neural network as a classifier to recognize human body posture. This article proposes a posture aware dynamic data delivery (PA-DDD) protocol to deliver data dynamically. The PA-DDD protocol can be used under varying speed walking scenario. The simulation results show that it prolongs the network lifetime and is energy efficient.

     

无线体域网节能MAC协议综论(英文)

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of key energy-efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). At the outset, we outline the crucial attributes of a good MAC protocol for WBAN. Several sources that contribute to the energy inefficiency of WBAN are identified, and features of the various MAC protocols qualitatively compared. Then, we further investigate some representative TDMA-based energy-efficient MAC protocols for WBAN by emphasizing their strength...     

Novel UWB Transceiver for WBAN Networks: A Study on AWGN Channels

A novel ultra‐wideband (UWB) transceiver structure is presented to be used in wireless body area networks (WBANs). In the proposed structure, a data channel and a control channel are combined into a single transmission signal. In the signal, a modulation method mixing pulse position modulation and pulse amplitude modulation is proposed. A mathematical framework calculating the power spectrum density of the proposed pulse‐based signal evaluates its coexistence with conventional radio systems. The transceiver structure is discussed, and the receiving performance is investigated in the additive white Gaussian noise channel. It is demonstrated that the proposed scheme is easier to match to the UWB emission mask than conventional UWB systems. The proposed scheme achieves the data rate requirement of WBAN; the logical control channel achieves better receiving performance than the logical data channel, which is useful for controlling and maintaining networks. The proposed scheme is also easy to implement.     

基于拓扑优化和链路感知的无线体域网路由协议

为解决无线体域网(Wireless Body Area Networks,WBAN)在人体运动过程中网络拓扑结构频繁变化导致链路质量和WBAN性能下降等问题,首先根据人体结构对WBAN网络拓扑进行优化,通过添加中继节点建立WBAN主干网,提供节点和hub之间相对稳定的链接,然后提出了适用于WBAN拓扑优化后的路由策略(Routing Protocol Based on Topology Optimization and Link Awareness,R-TOLA)。R-TOLA综合了链路质量感知和代价函数,通过调整主干网中继和节点中继获得最优化路径。仿真实验表明,基于拓扑结构优化和链路感知的R-TOLA协议和其他路由协议相比,在人体拓扑网络结构频繁变化的环境下具有网络生存时间更长、吞吐量更大等优势。     

Frame and carrier frequency synchronization algorithm for wireless body area network

A wireless body area network (WBAN) is a radio‐frequency‐based wireless communication technology that consists of a number of different sensor and actuator nodes interconnected with a body gateway. Considering the constrained resources in WBAN devices, simple and noise‐robust synchronization algorithms are required. Frame synchronization and frequency offset estimation are extremely important in the design of a robust WBAN receiver. In this paper, a detection strategy such as frame synchronization and frequency estimation is described in the WBAN system, which can improve the receiver performance. In doing so, algorithms are designed or chosen for the frame detection, carrier frequency offset synchronization, and joint fine‐time and phase‐offset estimation by exploiting the spike‐like property of the physical layer convergence protocol preamble and the frame structure in the WBAN system. The performance of the WBAN synchronization receiver is verified by computer simulation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

MC-MAC: a multi-channel based MAC scheme for interference mitigation in WBANs

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) support the inter-operability of biomedical sensors and medical institutions with convenience and high-efficiency, which makes it an appropriate solution for the pervasive healthcare. Typically, WBANs comprise in-body or around-body sensor nodes for collecting data of physiological feature. Therefore, the efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol is a crucial paramount to coordinate these devices and forward data to the medical center in an efficient and reliable way. However, the extensive use of wireless channel and coexistence of WBANs may result in inevitable interference which will cause performance degradation. Besides, contention-based access in single channel in WBANs is less efficient for dense medical traffic on account of large packet delay, energy consumption and low priority starvation. To address these issues above, we propose a multi-channel MAC (MC-MAC) scheme to obtain better network performance. Considering the characteristic and emergency degree of medical traffic, we introduce a novel channel mapping and selection mechanism, cooperating with conflict avoidance strategy, to organize nodes to access available channels without collisions. In addition, we have evaluated the performance of MC-MAC and the standard IEEE 802.15.6 via simulation and hardware test. The test is conducted by hardware platform based on prototype system of WBANs. Both of the analysis and simulation results show that MC-MAC outperforms the IEEE 802.15.6 in terms of packet delay, throughput, packet error rate and frame error rate.