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.     

Routing protocols for underwater wireless sensor networks based on data forwarding: a review

Nowadays, underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN) is an important field for researchers due to its well know applications like seismic monitoring, disaster prevention, offshore exploration, pollution monitoring, oceanography data collection, equipment monitoring, assisted navigation, and tactical surveillance. Many research challenges are available for UWSN; the design of routing protocol is one of them. The majority of the researchers have designed the routing algorithms but still, the data forwarding mechanism needs improvement. The reliable communication between the source and sink nodes is really a complicated task due to the limitation of the acoustic channel, water pressure, and limited bandwidth. This review paper focuses on the problems of those routing protocols which are based on data forwarding. In this review paper, we further present the route development, data forwarding, and route maintenance of the proposed routing protocols. The key aspects of this review article present the limitations and advantages of data forwarding routing protocols. We also present analysis of data forwarding routing protocols with analytical and numerical simulation methods with their critical analysis. This review article helps the researchers to create further research in the field of routing protocols based on data forwarding.     

Unequal Clustering Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks—Taxonomy,Comparison and Simulation

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of randomly distributed sensor nodes which can collect, process, route and transmit data from their respective environment. Most of the research on WSN is oriented towards optimizing utilization of finite resources of Sensor Nodes to increase the overall network operative time. Recent literature on WSNs reveals that hierarchical routing unequal clustering methodologies are gaining popularity due to energy efficiency, load balancing and scalability. In literature, numerous surveys on clustering methodologies are available which address different equal clustering methods. The unequal clustering protocols, which have their own attributes viz. balance load distribution, hot spot mitigation and energy efficiency, are comparatively less explored. This motivated us to undertake the present study on the taxonomy, comparison and simulation analysis of different methodologies pertaining to less explored unequal clustering protocols. Our base metrics for comparison of different unequal clustering protocols are scalability, energy efficiency & load balancing capability of the resulting network. A comprehensive discussion has also been presented to highlight the various advantages and disadvantages of different unequal clustering protocols. Further, we have summarized the study of unequal clustering protocols in the tabular form.

     

基于预测方法的无线体域网跨层优化研究

为改善无线体域网的能效和传输可靠性,该文针对其具有资源有限、信道质量波动频繁、所传输数据有异构性等特点,提出一种基于链路质量预测的跨层优化方案。通过对物理层、网络层和MAC层的松散耦合,自适应地选择传感器节点的传输功率,并且建立高效节能的端到端路由。仿真结果显示,该方案相对于已有的单层协议,整体提高了体域网的能量效率和传输可靠性。     

Pervasive, secure access to a hierarchical sensor-based healthcare monitoring architecture in wireless heterogeneous networks

This study presents a healthcare monitoring architecture coupled with wearable sensor systems and an environmental sensor network for monitoring elderly or chronic patients in their residence. The wearable sensor system, built into a fabric belt, consists of various medical sensors that collect a timely set of physiological health indicators transmitted via low energy wireless communication to mobile computing devices. Three application scenarios are implemented using the proposed network architecture. The group-based data collection and data transmission using the ad hoc mode promote outpatient healthcare services for only one medical staff member assigned to a set of patients. Adaptive security issues for data transmission are performed based on different wireless capabilities. This study also presents a monitoring application prototype for capturing sensor data from wireless sensor nodes. The implemented schemes were verified as performing efficiently and rapidly in the proposed network architecture.     

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.

     

Energy Efficient Routing Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Ant-Colony Optimization

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consists of numerous number of nodes fitted with energy reserves to collect large amount of data from the environment on which it is deployed. Energy conservation has huge importance in wsn since it is virtually impossible to recharge the nodes in their remote deployment. Forwarding the collected data from nodes to the base station requires considerable amount of energy. Hence efficient routing protocols should be used in forwarding the data to the base station in order to minimize the energy consumption thereby increasing the life-time of the network. In this proposed routing protocol, we consider a hierarchical routing architecture in which nodes in the outer-level forwards data to the inner-level nodes. Here we optimized the routing path using ant-colonies where data moves along minimal congested path. Further, when ant-colony optimization is used, certain cluster-head nodes may get overloaded with data forwarding resulting in early death due to lack of energy. To overcome this anomaly, we estimated the amount of data a neighboring Cluster-head can forward based on their residual energy. We compared the energy consumption results of this proposed Routing using Ant Colony Optimization (RACO) with other existing clustering protocols and found that this system conserves more energy thereby increasing lifetime of the network.

     

Lightweight routing with dynamic interests in wireless sensor and actor networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) have been increasingly popular for environmental monitoring applications in the last decade. While the deployment of sensor nodes enables a fine granularity of data collection, resource-rich actor nodes provide further evaluation of the information and reaction. Quality of service (QoS) and routing solutions for WSANs are challenging compared to traditional networks because of the limited node resources. WSANs also have different QoS requirements than wireless sensor networks (WSNs) since actors and sensor nodes have distinct resource constraints.In this paper, we present, LRP-QS, a lightweight routing protocol with dynamic interests and QoS support for WSANs. LRP-QS provides QoS by differentiating the rates among different types of interests with dynamic packet tagging at sensor nodes and per flow management at actor nodes. The interests, which define the types of events to observe, are distributed in the network. The weights of the interests are determined dynamically by using a nonsensitive ranking algorithm depending on the variation in the observed values of data collected in response to interests. Our simulation studies show that the proposed protocol provides a higher packet delivery ratio and a lower memory consumption than the existing state of the art protocols.     

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.     

A Proposal of B-Tree Based Routing Algorithm for Monitoring Systems with Regular Movements in MANETs

Routing Protocols in MANETs have been researched for peer-to-peer services in general. Furthermore, these protocols have been concerned with the fairness service amongst nodes’ peers. However, most of those protocols aren’t suitable for the data communication especially in hierarchical networks, where the most data flows are vertical like a monitoring system. Furthermore, for the monitoring system, amongst the nodes, one of them (a.k.a. root node) should be employed as a gateway to connect to Internet. Thus, most reporting data from certain nodes are delivered to the root node. Likewise, data should be delivered to the message originator nodes for responsibility. Therefore, a new routing protocol for such networks including the monitoring system is strongly required. This paper proposes a routing protocol based on the binary-tree shaped network, which derives from the general table driven methods’ routing manners with DSDV families of MANETs. In conclusion, we verify whether our protocol would be efficiently used in such networks through its performance evaluations with simulation results.     

Energy-aware and quality of service-based routing in wireless sensor networks and vehicular ad hoc networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have increasingly been used for remote monitoring tasks. Limited capabilities of sensor nodes in terms of communication, computation, and storage, present challenges to protocols designed for WSNs. Due to the severe energy constraint of sensor nodes, among the major concerns is the problem of designing efficient energy-aware routing protocols. Numerous routing protocols have been proposed in the literature. Cluster-based routing protocols for large-scale WSNs have some advantages as compared to a flat network topology. Clustering results in a reduced number of messages that propagate through the network in order to accomplish a sensing task. It also offers improved power control. Quality of Service (QoS) is becoming an important feature of data routing in WSNs. QoS is required for real-time data transmission when the result of a sensing task is dependent not only on the correct sensing of the environment but also on the timely delivery of the event notification to the monitoring center, the Sink. The emergency preparedness and response class of applications, for instance, impose delay requirements on the delivery of event notification messages. Transmitting video and imaging data poses certain bandwidth, delay, and jitter requirements on the routing protocols. Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are envisioned to improve intervehicle coordination and become a part of intelligent transport systems with an ultimate goal of increasing safety on the roads and improving travel comfort. VANETs may include WSNs that are placed along the sides of roads and provide monitoring of road conditions. Routing protocols for VANETs also aim at satisfying end-to-end QoS requirements. This paper first discusses energy-efficient clustering routing protocols for WSNs, followed by approaches aimed at satisfying QoS in WSNs and VANETS. Lastly, a discussion and comparison of features of the selected routing protocols and QoS-based approaches is presented.     

Energy Efficient Layered Cluster Head Rotation Based Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is of paramount concern in underwater sensor networks. The very nature of underwater environment makes it difficult to deploy an energy efficient network that enhances network lifetime. The existing protocols of terrestrial networks cannot be implemented directly to underwater scenarios and as such new protocols have to be designed because of speed of signal propagation under water. Improving the energy efficiency in UWSNs is an active area of research and many protocols to that end have been proposed. The routing protocol that this paper proposes is Energy Efficient Layered Cluster Head Rotation (EE-LCHR) routing protocol. This protocol makes use of the multi sink architecture and creates virtual layers containing a number of sensor nodes such that the hop count from the sensor nodes in a particular layer to the surface sink is the same. Also each layer has a number of clusters with a cluster head that keeps on rotating depending on the fitness value of the sensor nodes. The proposed protocol as compared to other extant protocols like EE-DBR and DBR improves network lifetime. The presence of virtual layers and rotation of cluster heads together ensure that energy balance is better achieved in our proposed protocol which leads to an enhanced network lifetime.

     

Correction to: Detection of Epileptical Seizures Based on Alpha Band Statistical Features

Intra-WBSN are generally short range wireless health monitoring networks, consisting of strategically placed miniaturized, intelligent and low powered bio-sensors. They perform various applications in healthcare, fitness, military, sport and consumer electronics. The network stability and the network longevity of such networks have prime focus in current research. Routing schemes have a significant potential to make such network energy efficient by sending the sensing data properly and promptly. In this paper, we have proposed a relay based cooperative routing scheme to achieve high energy efficiency. Sensing data from the bio-sensor node have been delivered on the basis data priority. The sensing data with high priority has been directly transmitted to body network controller (BNC). The delivery of normal sensing data from bio-sensor to the BNC through relay nod or cooperative node. These nodes are deployed in clothes, they can be easily replaced or recharged, it provide effective, easy and comfortable health monitoring. Through simulation results, the proposed routing protocol achieved improved performance in terms of energy efficiency, network stability, network lifetime, path-loss and throughput in comparison to the existing routing schemes.

     

An Adaptive Beaconing MAC Protocol Providing Energy-Efficient Healthcare Service

We present an Adaptive Beaconing Medium Access Control (AB-MAC) protocol based on time division multiple access (TDMA) in order to provide healthcare services. The purpose of our protocol is to gain not only energy-efficiency but also provide low delivery latency when both periodic data and event-driven data are present. In order to satisfy these requirements, we propose standby slots that are deployed during each beacon interval. The standby slots are able to identify unscheduled data with low delivery latency. An adaptive beacon is then provided that quickly reschedules the time slots. Furthermore, the AB-MAC asymmetrically assigns energy consumption to a coordinator instead of the sensor nodes when possible in order to reduce sensor node energy waste. In this paper, we analyze the IEEE 802.15.4 and the AB-MAC, and evaluate their energy consumption and delivery latency. NS-2 simulations are used to validate the numerical analysis. The evaluation results indicate that the AB-MAC is a more suitable protocol than the IEEE 802.15.4 when used in WBANs.     

Energy Harvesting Based Efficient Routing Scheme for Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Network were deployed in a complex environment where the wide range of complex application is mandatory for the services. Such application includes military, agriculture, healthcare, defense, monitoring, surveillance etc. In general sensor nodes were spatially distributed and deployed in remote fashion, usually they are powered up by batteries. These battery powered sensor nodes are pruned to failure due to its power constrained nature. This led many researchers to explore energy efficient context aware routing for Wireless Sensor Networks. Hence a novel energy harvesting based efficient routing scheme is desirable to address the above stated problem. The key idea is to harvest the energy source from the deployed environment. The proposed routing scheme is tested and validated in MATLAB based simulation test bed. The experimental results shows that the proposed routing scheme is robust and meet all the requirements of routing and promising results for energy usage.     

Clustering Based Two Dimensional Motion of Sink Node in Wireless Sensor Networks

The wireless sensor network (WSN) is always known for its limited-energy issues and finding a good solution for energy minimization in WSNs is still a concern for researchers. Implementing mobility to the sink node is used widely for energy conservation or minimization in WSNs which reduces the distance between sink and communicating nodes. In this paper, with the intention to conserve energy from the sensor nodes, we designed a clustering based routing protocol implementing a mobile sink called ‘two dimensional motion of sink node (TDMS)’. In TDMS, each normal sensor node collects data and send it to their respective leader node called cluster head (CH). The sink moves in the two dimensional direction to collect final data from all CH nodes, particularly it moves in the direction to that CH which has the minimum remaining energy. The proposed protocol is validated through rigorous simulation using MATLAB and comparisons have been made with WSN’s existing static sink and mobile sink routing protocols over two different geographical square dimensions of the network. Here, we found that TDMS model gives the optimal result on energy dissipation per round and increased network lifetime.

     

Adaptive energy aware cluster-based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have grown excessively due to their various applications and low installation cost. In WSN, the main concern is to reduce energy consumption among nodes while maintaining timely and reliable data forwarding. However, most of the existing energy aware routing protocols incur unbalanced energy consumption, which results in inefficient load balancing and compromised network lifetime. Therefore, the main target of this research paper is to present adaptive energy aware cluster-based routing (AECR) protocol for improving energy conservation and data delivery performance. Our proposed AECR protocol differs from other energy efficient routing schemes in some aspects. Firstly, it generates balance sized clusters based on nodes distribution and avoids random clusters formation. Secondly, it optimizes both intra-cluster and inter-cluster routing paths for improving data delivery performance while balancing data traffic on constructed forwarding routes and at the end, in order to reduce the excessive energy consumption and improving load distribution, the role of Cluster Head (CH) is shifted dynamically among nodes by exploit of network conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that AECR protocol outperforms state of the art in terms of various performance metrics.

     

Overlapping particle swarms for energy-efficient routing in sensor networks

Sensor networks are traditionally built using battery-powered, collaborative devices. These sensor nodes do not rely on dedicated infrastructure services (e.g., routers) to relay data. Rather, a communal effort is employed where the sensor nodes both generate data as well as forward data for other nodes. A routing protocol is needed in order for the sensors to determine viable paths through the network, but routing protocols designed for wired networks and even ad hoc networks are not sufficient given the energy overhead needed to operate them. We propose an energy-aware routing protocol, based on overlapping swarms of particles, that offers reliable path selection while reducing the energy consumption for the route selection process. Our particle-based routing with overlapping swarms for energy-efficiency algorithm shows promise in extending the life of battery-powered networks while still providing robust routing functionality to maintain network reliability.     

Empirical analysis of the reliability of low‐rate wireless u‐healthcare monitoring applications

In this paper, we demonstrate an empirical analysis of the reliability of low‐rate wireless u‐healthcare monitoring applications. We have considered the performance analysis of the IEEE 802.15.4 low‐rate wireless technologies for u‐healthcare applications. For empirical measurement, we considered three scenarios in which the reliability features of the low‐rate wireless u‐healthcare monitoring applications have been measured: (i) distance between sensor nodes and base station; (ii) deployment of the number of sensor nodes in a network; and (iii) data transmission by different time intervals. The experimental results show that received data are used to calculate BER and analyze the performance according to the scenarios. The BER is affected when varying the distance between sensor node and base station, the number of nodes, and time interval. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

G-STAR: Geometric STAteless Routing for 3-D wireless sensor networks

3-D aerial and underwater sensor networks have found various applications in natural habitat monitoring, weather/earthquake forecast, terrorist intrusion detection, and homeland security. The resource-constrained and dynamic nature of such networks has made the stateless routing protocol with only local information a preferable choice. However, most of the existing routing protocols require sensor nodes to either proactively maintain the state information or flood the network from time to time. The existing stateless geometric routing protocols either fail to work in 3-D environments or have tendency to produce lengthy paths. In this paper, we propose a novel routing protocol, namely Geometric STAteless Routing (G-STAR) for 3-D networks. The main idea of G-STAR is to distributively build a location-based tree and find a path dynamically. G-STAR not only generalizes the notion of geographic routing from two modes to one mode, but also guarantees packet delivery even when the location information of some nodes is either inaccurate or simply unavailable regardless of the uses of virtual coordinates. In addition, we develop a light-weight path pruning algorithm, namely Branch Pruning (BP), that can be combined with G-STAR to enhance the routing performance with very little overhead. The extensive simulation results by ns-2 have shown that the proposed routing protocols perform significantly better than the existing 3-D geometric routing protocols in terms of delivery rate with competitive hop stretch. We conclude that the proposed protocols serve as a strong candidate for future high-dimensional sensor networks.