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.     

Ultrawideband wireless body-area sensor networks

The operation principles of wireless body-area networks (WBANs) and requirements to their infrastructure are described. The new IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN standard, in which an ultrawideband (UWB) signal is used as an information carrier, is discussed. The general properties of the given standard and its distinctions from the existing wireless personal communications standards are analyzed. It is demonstrated that UWB direct chaotic transceivers are promising for use in the wireless sensor networks based on the new standard.     

IEEE 802.15.6中能量有效的无线体域网拓扑结构优化研究

提出一种无线体域网(WBAN, wireless body area network)的网络拓扑结构设计方案。该方案针对IEEE 802.15.6标准的2跳扩展星型拓扑结构,建立基于混合整数非线性规划的能耗成本优化模型,通过调整中继节点的位置和数量,以及数据到汇聚节点的路由,获得优化的网络拓扑结构。实验结果分析表明,与Elias提出的EAWD(energy aware WBAN design) 模型相比,所提出的方案能使网络能耗减少40.5%,网络时延平均降低52.4%,网络寿命提高了一倍。     

Analysis of Fairness Problem for IEEE 802.15.6 Slotted Aloha Algorithm

Wireless Personal Communications - The IEEE 802.15.6 slotted Aloha protocol defines a contention based medium access mechanism for wireless body area network (WBAN). However the proposed scheme can...     

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.     

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。     

On the implant communication and MAC protocols for WBAN

Recent advances in micro‐electro‐mechanical systems, wireless communication, low‐power intelligent sensors, and semiconductor technologies have allowed the realization of a wireless body area network (WBAN). A WBAN provides unobtrusive health monitoring for a long period of time with real‐time updates to the physician. It is widely used for ubiquitous health care, entertainment, and military applications. The implantable and wearable medical devices have several critical requirements such as power consumption, data rate, size, and low‐power medium access control (MAC) protocols. This article consists of two parts: body implant communication, which is concerned with the communication to and from a human body using radio frequency (RF) technology, and WBAN MAC protocols, which presents several low‐power MAC protocols for a WBAN with useful guidelines including a case study of IEEE 802.15.4, PB‐TDMA, and SMAC protocols. In body implant communication, the in‐body RF performance is affected considerably by the implant's depth and different polarization combinations inside the human body as well as by the muscle and fat. We observe best performance at a depth of 3 to 5 cm and not close to the human skin. Furthermore, the study of low‐power MAC protocols highlights the most important aspects of developing a novel low‐power and reliable MAC protocol for a WBAN. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于分级统计最大平均功率的WBAN符号同步算法

基于最大平均功率的符号同步算法,适合无线体域网对同步算法的快速定时、对载频偏移不敏感特性的要求。基于IEEE 802.15.6标准,通过分级统计平均功率的方法降低算法运算复杂度,实现了体域网链路的低复杂度高效率符号同步。理论推导及仿真结果表明,该算法可在32个符号内完成符号同步,算法复杂度较常规的最大平均功率算法最多可降低近90%。其快速同步及不受载波相位偏移影响的特性也为载频同步及帧同步提供了更多的优化空间。     

无线体域网低复杂度重复码解扩频方法研究

为了提高数据传输的可靠性,降低窄带接收机的复杂度,无线体域网标准IEEE 802.15.6采用了基于重复码的扩频方法。通过设计一种根据动态阈值选择性进行量度运算的解扩频结构,并结合硬判决阈值特性利用简化的最大比合并以及广义最小距离原理,提出了硬阈值—合并法和硬阈值—删除法,计算复杂度较小,同时解扩频性能近似最优。理论分析及仿真结果表明,与基于最大似然方法的解扩频相比,其扩频增益接近理论值,在高信噪比环境下,计算复杂度可降低86%以上。     

A survey and comparison of multichannel protocols for performance anomaly mitigation in IEEE 802.11wireless networks

Providing multichannel functionality can improve the performance of wireless networks. Although off‐the‐shelf IEEE 802.11 physical layer and medium access control specifications support multiple channels and multiple data rates, one of the major challenges is how to efficiently utilize available channels and data rates to improve network performance. In multirate networks, low‐rate links severely degrade the capacity of high‐rate links, which is known as performance anomaly. To overcome the performance anomaly problem, different data rate links can get equal air‐time by exploiting time diversity and frequency diversity, or they can be separated over nonoverlapping channels. In this paper, we study existing multichannel protocols proposed to mitigate the performance anomaly problem by classifying them into single‐radio protocols, multiradio single‐hop protocols, and multiradio multihop protocols. To investigate the effectiveness of multichannel solutions for performance anomaly, we compare these protocols with well‐known multichannel protocols that do not consider performance anomaly. In addition, this paper gives insightful research issues to design multichannel protocols that mitigate performance anomaly in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 sensor networks in industrial applications

Wireless sensor networks have been widely applied in industrial applications especially since the release of IEEE 802.15.4 standard. By participating in an automobile project in which an IEEE 802.15.4 based sensor and actuator network is deployed to measure and control the vibrations of an automotive system, we need to study many metrics of IEEE 802.15.4 sensor networks (e.g., packet delivery rate, latency, and energy consumption) under various sampling rates. In order to provide detailed modeling of hardware and software as well as network behaviors on each sensor node, we conduct plenty of experiments on a SystemC‐based wireless sensor networks simulator IDEA1, which supports the hardware and software co‐simulation of sensor nodes with certain flexibility of abstraction level. Compared with the existing works on performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 protocols, the main contributions of this paper are the comprehensive studies of both beacon‐enabled and nonbeacon‐enabled modes under various parameter settings and the beacon tracking synchronization mechanism in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which is ignored in most previous works. Additionally, the in‐depth analysis of simulation results enables us to find the best parameter configurations to different traffic loads and application requirements, which can be used as general experiences for other applications.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Secure Crypto Base Authentication and Communication Suite in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) for IoT Applications

To monitor the functions of human body and their surroundings Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is used, which are based on low powered and light weight wireless sensors devices. WBAN highly supports numerous applications but this study will focus on the security of ubiquitous healthcare applications. In E-health research monitoring the critical data in terms of security has become a major challenge as WBAN deals with various threats day by day. Therefore the design of secure and reasonably resource optimal algorithms with a robust key generation and management scheme is today’s need. There must be only authorized user’s who can have access to patient related data; otherwise it can be exploited by anyone. This proposed study is aiming to formulate the two security suite for WBAN, which comprises on KBS keys, KAISC and Hash algorithm three improved versions of key management procedures and authentication procedure respectively. Firstly the KBS Keys and improved Hashing suite which is an independent and adaptive key management and authentication scheme for improving the security of WBANs will be used, and secondly KAISC will be used for inter-sensor communication and key management security scheme. All above mentioned procedures will be suitably blend with the encryption and decryption process which will securely send the patient’s critical data to the base station and further to the concerned doctor. The novelty of work is that the proposed methodology is not only simple but also advanced and much secured procedure of key generation and management that will be further validated by the performance analysis. This technique will be beneficial for the continuous monitoring of patient’s critical data in remote areas also.     

An efficient anonymous authentication and confidentiality preservation schemes for secure communications in wireless body area networks

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is utilized in various healthcare applications due to its ability to provide suitable medical services by exchanging the biological data between the patient and doctor through a network of implantable or wearable medical sensors connected in the patients’ body. The collected data are communicated to the medical personals through open wireless channels. Nevertheless, due to the open wireless nature of communication channels, WBAN is susceptible to security attacks by malicious users. For that reason, secure anonymous authentication and confidentiality preservation schemes are essential in WBAN. Authentication and confidentiality play a significant role while transfers, medical images securely across the network. Since medical images contain highly sensitive information, those images should be transferred securely from the patients to the doctor and vice versa. The proposed anonymous authentication technique helps to ensure the legitimacy of the patient and doctors without disclosing their privacy. Even though various cryptographic encryption techniques such as AES and DES are available to provide confidentiality, the key size and the key sharing are the main problems to provide a worthy level of security. Hence, an efficient affine cipher-based encryption technique is proposed in this paper to offer a high level of confidentiality with smaller key size compared to existing encryption techniques. The security strength of the proposed work against various harmful security attacks is proven in security analysis section to ensure that it provides better security. The storage cost, communication cost and computational cost of the proposed scheme are demonstrated in the performance analysis section elaborately. In connection to this, the computational complexity of the proposed scheme is reduced around 29% compared to the existing scheme.

     

An Improved Pillar K-Means Based Protocol for Privacy-Preserving Location Monitoring in Wireless Sensor Network

A number of tiny sensor nodes are strategically placed in and around the human body to obtain physiological information. The sensor nodes are connected to a coordinator or a data collector to form a wireless body area network (WBAN). WBAN consists of variety of medical and non-medical applications with aggregate data rate requirement ranging from few bytes per second to 10 Mbps. These applications are having relatively different energy saving, reliability and quality of service (QoS) requirements. For example, emergency medical data are highly erratic but should be transferred with high reliability and minimum delay, whereas electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram applications are constant bit rate traffic which need to be transferred with moderate reliability. Additionally, non-medical applications include variable bit rate traffic and their jitter and delay requirements must also be met. On the above, a sensor node should spend minimum energy and conserve power to increase its life time in the network. The existing media access control (MAC) protocols present in various short and medium range wireless technologies such as 802.11 and 802.15.4 have been designed for specific purposes, and therefore, do not fulfill the diverse performance requirements across all WBAN applications. In this paper, we propose a poll-based MAC protocol, PMAC for WBAN, which can meet such diversified functional requirements of various WBAN applications. In particular, we introduce few concepts in polling based channel access mechanism to make an energy efficient and QoS aware MAC protocol. The design has been validated by obtaining the performance of proposed PMAC protocol through simulation.     

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.     

A prioritized resource allocation algorithm for multiple wireless body area networks

This paper presents a prioritized resource allocation algorithm to share the limited communication channel resource among multiple wireless body area networks. The proposed algorithm is designed based on an active superframe interleaving scheme, one of the coexistence mechanisms in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. It is the first study to consider the resource allocation method among wireless body area networks within a communication range. The traffic source of each wireless body area network is parameterized using the traffic specification, and required service rate for each wireless body area networks can be derived. The prioritized resource allocation algorithm employs this information to allocate the channel resource based on the wireless body area networks’ service priority. The simulation results verified that the traffic specification and the wireless body area network service priority based resource allocation are able to increase quality of service satisfaction, particularly for health and medical services.     

Improved channel‐aware MAC protocols for wireless local area networks

This paper studies the fading properties of the communication channel assumed in wireless local area networks (WLANs) and devises efficient channel‐aware protocols for the distributed coordination function (DCF) and the point coordination function (PCF), the two modes of communication defined in the IEEE standard for WLAN. Our simulations show that the proposed PCF protocol improves the channel capacity usage up to 14% and the proposed DCF protocol improves the channel capacity up to 90%, when compared with standard IEEE 802.11 implementations, depending on the loss rate and temporal characteristics of the wireless channel. The proposed protocols introduce minimum computational overhead. We also show that, compared with standard DCF protocol defined in IEEE 802.11, the proposed DCF protocol can lower the SNR requirements for a given packet error rate thus potentially extending the battery life of portable devices that use WLAN.. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Efficient Patient Care Through Wireless Body Area Networks—Enhanced Technique for Handling Emergency Situations with Better Quality of Service

Wireless body area networks (WBAN) is a wireless network of sensors placed in and around the human body for monitoring the patient conditions remotely. The goal of WBAN networks is to report the patient condition to the monitoring system with maximum reliability and minimum delay and deliver the life critical data in the emergency situation with utmost priority. The proposed MAC protocol is aimed at delivery of emergency packets with maximum reliability and minimum delay through the introduction of mini slots in the beacon enabled superframe for exclusive transmission of the same. To improve the packet delivery ratio of the normal packets and decrease the energy consumption of the low data rate nodes, a packet rate based scheduled slot allocation is added to this protocol. Extensive simulations show that the proposed protocol is able to achieve nearly 98% packet delivery ratio and less than 100 ms delay for emergency packets. By varying the number of allocated scheduled slots based on the packet rate of the nodes, the proposed protocol has shown improved performance in the packet delivery ratio (93%) of normal packets as compared to IEEE 802.15.6 (85%), also the energy consumption of low data rate nodes has decreased by 64%. The results show that the proposed protocol is successful in realizing much better delay and packet delivery values for emergency and normal packets.     

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.     

Secure and efficient scheme for fast initial link setup against key reinstallation attacks in IEEE 802.11ah networks

IEEE 802.11ah is a recently released IEEE standard to specify a wireless communication system with a long‐range, low‐power, and low data transmission rate over smart devices used in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. This new standard belongs to IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) protocol family. It requires lightweight protocols to support the low‐power and low‐latency features of the IoT devices. On the other hand, an upcoming solution of fast initial link setup (FILS) specified by IEEE 802.11ai standard is a brand‐new approach aiming to establish fast and secure links among devices in WLANs to meet this new demand. It is natural and feasible to apply it to the 802.11ah networks to support massively deployed wireless nodes. However, security concerns on the link connection by the FILS scheme have not been fully eliminated, especially in the authentication process. It has been explored that a type of recently revealed malicious attack, key reinstallation attack (KRA) might be a threat to the FILS authentication. To prevent the success of the KRAs, in this paper, we proposed a secure and efficient FILS (SEF) protocol as the optional substitute of the FILS scheme. The SEF scheme is designed to eradicate potential threats from the KRAs without degrading the network performance.