An Analysis of the Requirements for Efficient Protocols in WBAN

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) plays a major role in the advancement of technology, particularly for diagnosising the many life threatening diseases as well as providing real-time health monitoring. The objective of this paper is to study and analyze the problems of protocols in WBAN to provide the requirements related to health care in a medical environment. The protocols need to be energy efficient and reliable as well. To date, several metrics, such as channel utilization and energy efficiencies are defined. This research provides a clear outlook on the types of routing protocols and the problems related to the losses and distribution of data in a medical environment, thus meeting energy efficiency, low delay and reliability

Wearable and Implantable Wireless Sensor Network Solutions for Healthcare Monitoring

Wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies are considered one of the key research areas in computer science and the healthcare application industries for improving the quality of life. The purpose of this paper is to provide a snapshot of current developments and future direction of research on wearable and implantable body area network systems for continuous monitoring of patients. This paper explains the important role of body sensor networks in medicine to minimize the need for caregivers and help the chronically ill and elderly people live an independent life, besides providing people with quality care. The paper provides several examples of state of the art technology together with the design considerations like unobtrusiveness, scalability, energy efficiency, security and also provides a comprehensive analysis of the various benefits and drawbacks of these systems. Although offering significant benefits, the field of wearable and implantable body sensor networks still faces major challenges and open research problems which are investigated and covered, along with some proposed solutions, in this paper

Mobility Enhancement of Patients Body Monitoring based on WBAN with Multipath Routing

—One of the promising applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is monitoring of the human body for health concerns. For this purpose, a large number of small sensors are implanted in the human body. These sensors altogether provide a network of wireless sensors (WBANs) and monitor the vital signs and signals of the human body; these sensors will then send this information to the doctor. The most important application of the WBAN is the implementation of the monitoring network for patient safety in the hospital environment. In this case, supporting patients’ mobility is one of the basic needs, which has been underestimated in recent studies. The problem that involves providing the required energy for the units used in this type of network is challenging; for this reason, sent/ received units with very low power consumption and with a very small radius are used in order to save energy. The resulting small sending range, leads to the lack of support for patients' mobility. In this paper, the AD HOC mode is suggested for use to establish a network and a multi-path routing algorithm, for the purpose of importing patients’ mobility in hospital setting. The results of the simulation show that in addition to supporting patients' mobility, the use of the proposed idea instead of previously presented protocols, reduces delays in data transmission and energy consumption; and it also increases the delivery rate depending on the destination and the lifetime of the network, while on the other hand, it increases routing overhead

The Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks and Routing Strategies: Nomenclature and Review of Literature

WBASN is an effective solution that has been proposed in terms of improving the solutions and there are varied benefits that have been achieved from the usage of WBASN solutions in communication, healthcare domain. From the review of stats on rising number of wireless devices and solutions that are coming up which is embraced by the people as wearable devices, implants for medical diagnostic solutions, etc. reflect upon the growing demand for effective models. However, the challenge is about effective performance of such solutions with optimal efficiency. Due to certain intrinsic factors like numerous standards that are available, and also due to the necessity for identifying the best solutions that are based on application requirements. Some of the key issues that have to be considered in the process of WBASN are about the impacts that are taking place from the wireless medium, the lifetime of batteries in the WBASN devices and the other significant condition like the coexistence of the systems among varied other wireless networks that are constituted in the proximity. In this study, scores of models that has been proposed pertaining to MAC protocols for WBASN solutions has been reviewed to understand the efficacy of the existing systems, and a scope for process improvement has been explored for conducting in detail research and developing a solution

The role of cross-layered designs in wireless body area network

With recent advancement, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) plays an important role to detect various diseases of a patient in advance and informs the medical team about the life threatening situation. WBAN comprises of small intelligent Biomedical sensors which are implanted inside patient body and attached on the surface of a patient to monitor different vital signs, namely; respiratory rate, ECG, EMG, temperature, blood pressure, glucose. The routing layer of WBAN has the same challenging problems as similarly faced in WSN but the unique challenge is the temperature-rise during monitoring of vital signs and data transmission. IEEE 802.15.6 MAC Superframe of WBAN is different from IEEE 802.15.4 MAC of WSN and provides channels to emergency and non-emergency data for transmission. As similarly seen in WSN, PHY layer of IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 provide various modulation techniques for data transmission. The purpose of this study is to familiar with routing layer, MAC layer and PHY layer in the cross-layer design of WBA

ATLAS: A Traffic Load Aware Sensor MAC Design for Collaborative Body Area Sensor Networks

In collaborative body sensor networks, namely wireless body area networks (WBANs), each of the physical sensor applications is used to collaboratively monitor the health status of the human body. The applications of WBANs comprise diverse and dynamic traffic loads such as very low-rate periodic monitoring (i.e., observation) data and high-rate traffic including event-triggered bursts. Therefore, in designing a medium access control (MAC) protocol for WBANs, energy conservation should be the primary concern during low-traffic periods, whereas a balance between satisfying high-throughput demand and efficient energy usage is necessary during high-traffic times. In this paper, we design a traffic load-aware innovative MAC solution for WBANs, called ATLAS. The design exploits the superframe structure of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, and it adaptively uses the contention access period (CAP), contention free period (CFP) and inactive period (IP) of the superframe based on estimated traffic load, by applying a dynamic “wh” (whenever which is required) approach. Unlike earlier work, the proposed MAC design includes load estimation for network load-status awareness and a multi-hop communication pattern in order to prevent energy loss associated with long range transmission. Finally, ATLAS is evaluated through extensive simulations in ns-2 and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the protocol

TRW-MAC: A thermal-aware receiver-driven wake-up radio enabled duty cycle MAC protocol for multi-hop implantable wireless body area networks in Internet of Things

Implantable Wireless Body Area Network (IWBAN), a network of implantable medical sensors, is one of the emerging network paradigms due to the rapid proliferation of wireless technologies and growing demand of sophisticated healthcare. The wireless sensors in IWBAN is capable of communicating with each other through radio frequency (RF) link. However, recurring wireless communication inside the human body induces heat causing severe thermal damage to the human tissue which, if not controlled, may appear as a threat to human life. Moreover, higher propagation loss inside the human body as well as low-power requirement of the sensor nodes necessitate multi-hop communication for IWBAN. A IWBAN also requires meeting certain Quality of Service demands in terms of energy, delay, reliability etc. These pressing concerns engender the design of TRW-MAC: A thermal-aware receiver-driven wake-up radio enabled duty cycle MAC protocol for multi-hop IWBANs in Internet of Things. TRW-MAC introduces a thermal-aware duty cycle adjustment mechanism to reduce temperature inside the body and adopts wake-up radio (WuR) scheme for attaining higher energy efficiency. The protocol devises a wake-up estimation scheme to facilitate staggered wake-up schedule for multi-hop transmission. A superframe structure is introduced that utilizes both contention-based and contention free medium access operations. The performance of TRW-MAC is evaluated through simulations that exhibit its superior performance in attaining lower thermal-rise as well as satisfying other QoS metrics in terms of energy-efficiency, delay and reliability