62,796 research outputs found
A Study of IEEE 802.15.4 Security Framework for Wireless Body Area Network
A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a collection of low-power and
lightweight wireless sensor nodes that are used to monitor the human body
functions and the surrounding environment. It supports a number of innovative
and interesting applications, including ubiquitous healthcare and Consumer
Electronics (CE) applications. Since WBAN nodes are used to collect sensitive
(life-critical) information and may operate in hostile environments, they
require strict security mechanisms to prevent malicious interaction with the
system. In this paper, we first highlight major security requirements and
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks in WBAN at Physical, Medium Access Control
(MAC), Network, and Transport layers. Then we discuss the IEEE 802.15.4
security framework and identify the security vulnerabilities and major attacks
in the context of WBAN. Different types of attacks on the Contention Access
Period (CAP) and Contention Free Period (CFP) parts of the superframe are
analyzed and discussed. It is observed that a smart attacker can successfully
corrupt an increasing number of GTS slots in the CFP period and can
considerably affect the Quality of Service (QoS) in WBAN (since most of the
data is carried in CFP period). As we increase the number of smart attackers
the corrupted GTS slots are eventually increased, which prevents the legitimate
nodes to utilize the bandwidth efficiently. This means that the direct
adaptation of IEEE 802.15.4 security framework for WBAN is not totally secure
for certain WBAN applications. New solutions are required to integrate high
level security in WBAN.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 2 table
Analytical modelling of the effect of noise on the terahertz in-vivo communication channel for body-centric nano-networks
The paper presents an analytical model of the terahertz (THz) communication channel (0.1 - 10 THz) for in-vivo nano-networks by considering the effect of noise on link quality and information rate. The molecular absorption noise model for in-vivo nano-networks is developed based on the physical mechanisms of the noise present in the medium, which takes into account both the radiation of the medium and the molecular absorption from the transmitted signal. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the communication channel is investigated for different power allocation schemes and the maximum achievable information rate is studied to explore the potential of THz communication inside the human body. The obtained results show that the information rate is inversely proportional to the transmission distance. Based on the studies on channel performance, it can be concluded that the achievable transmission distance of in-vivo THz nano-networks should be restrained to approximately 2 mm maximum, while the operation band of in-vivo THz nano-networks should be limited to the lower band of the THz band. This motivates the utilisation of hierarchical/cooperative networking concepts and hybrid communication techniques using molecular and electromagnetic methods for future body-centric nano-networks
Electromagnetic emission-aware schedulers for the uplink of OFDM wireless communication systems
The popularity and convergence of wireless communications have resulted in continuous network upgrades in order to support the increasing demand for bandwidth. However, given that wireless communication systems operate on radiofrequency waves, the health effects of electromagnetic emission from these systems are increasingly becoming a concern due to the ubiquity of mobile communication devices. In order to address these concerns, we propose two schemes (offline and online) for minimizing the EM emission of users in the uplink of OFDM systems, while maintaining an acceptable quality of service. We formulate our offline EM reduction scheme as a convex optimization problem and solve it through water-filling. This is based on the assumption that the long-term channel state information of all the users is known. Given that, in practice, long-term channel state information of all the users cannot always be available, we propose our online EM emission reduction scheme, which is based on minimizing the instantaneous transmit energy per bit of each user. Simulation results show that both our proposed schemes significantly minimize the EM emission when compared to the benchmark classic greedy spectral efficiency based scheme and an energy efficiency based scheme. Furthermore, our offline scheme proves to be very robust against channel prediction errors
Energy-Delay Tradeoff and Dynamic Sleep Switching for Bluetooth-Like Body-Area Sensor Networks
Wireless technology enables novel approaches to healthcare, in particular the
remote monitoring of vital signs and other parameters indicative of people's
health. This paper considers a system scenario relevant to such applications,
where a smart-phone acts as a data-collecting hub, gathering data from a number
of wireless-capable body sensors, and relaying them to a healthcare provider
host through standard existing cellular networks. Delay of critical data and
sensors' energy efficiency are both relevant and conflicting issues. Therefore,
it is important to operate the wireless body-area sensor network at some
desired point close to the optimal energy-delay tradeoff curve. This tradeoff
curve is a function of the employed physical-layer protocol: in particular, it
depends on the multiple-access scheme and on the coding and modulation schemes
available. In this work, we consider a protocol closely inspired by the
widely-used Bluetooth standard. First, we consider the calculation of the
minimum energy function, i.e., the minimum sum energy per symbol that
guarantees the stability of all transmission queues in the network. Then, we
apply the general theory developed by Neely to develop a dynamic scheduling
policy that approaches the optimal energy-delay tradeoff for the network at
hand. Finally, we examine the queue dynamics and propose a novel policy that
adaptively switches between connected and disconnected (sleeping) modes. We
demonstrate that the proposed policy can achieve significant gains in the
realistic case where the control "NULL" packets necessary to maintain the
connection alive, have a non-zero energy cost, and the data arrival statistics
corresponding to the sensed physical process are bursty.Comment: Extended version (with proofs details in the Appendix) of a paper
accepted for publication on the IEEE Transactions on Communication
Dynamic Channel Access Scheme for Interference Mitigation in Relay-assisted Intra-WBANs
This work addresses problems related to interference mitigation in a single
wireless body area network (WBAN). In this paper, We propose a distributed
\textit{C}ombined carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance
(CSMA/CA) with \textit{F}lexible time division multiple access (\textit{T}DMA)
scheme for \textit{I}nterference \textit{M}itigation in relay-assisted
intra-WBAN, namely, CFTIM. In CFTIM scheme, non interfering sources
(transmitters) use CSMA/CA to communicate with relays. Whilst, high interfering
sources and best relays use flexible TDMA to communicate with coordinator (C)
through using stable channels. Simulation results of the proposed scheme are
compared to other schemes and consequently CFTIM scheme outperforms in all
cases. These results prove that the proposed scheme mitigates interference,
extends WBAN energy lifetime and improves the throughput. To further reduce the
interference level, we analytically show that the outage probability can be
effectively reduced to the minimal.Comment: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Protocol Engineering (ICPE) and
International Conference on New Technologies of Distributed Systems (NTDS),
Paris, France. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1602.0865
On the Optimum Energy Efficiency for Flat-fading Channels with Rate-dependent Circuit Power
This paper investigates the optimum energy efficiency (EE) and the
corresponding spectral efficiency (SE) for a communication link operating over
a flat-fading channel. The EE is evaluated by the total energy consumption for
transmitting per message bit. Three channel cases are considered, namely static
channel with channel state information available at transmitter (CSIT),
fast-varying (FV) channel with channel distribution information available at
transmitter (CDIT), and FV channel with CSIT. A general circuit power model is
considered. For all the three channel cases, the tradeoff between the EE and SE
is studied. It is shown that the EE improves strictly as the SE increases from
0 to the optimum SE, and then strictly degrades as the SE increases beyond the
optimum SE. The impact of {\kappa}, {\rho} and other system parameters on the
optimum EE and corresponding SE is investigated to obtain insight.Some of the
important and interesting results for all the channel cases include: (1) when
{\kappa} increases the SE corresponding to the optimum EE should keep unchanged
if {\phi}(R) = R, but reduced if {\phi}(R) is strictly convex of R; (2) when
the rate-independent circuit power {\rho} increases, the SE corresponding to
the optimum EE has to be increased. A polynomial-complexity algorithm is
developed with the bisection method to find the optimum SE. The insight is
corroborated and the optimum EE for the three cases are compared by simulation
results.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication
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