Reliable, Context-Aware and Energy-Efficient Architecture for Wireless Body Area Networks in Sports Applications

RÉSUMÉ Un Réseau Corporel Sans Fil (RCSF, Wireless Body Area Network en anglais ou WBAN) permet de collecter de l'information à partir de capteurs corporels. Cette information est envoyée à un hub qui la transforme et qui peut aussi effectuer d'autres fonctions comme gérer des événements corporels, fusionner les données à partir des capteurs, percevoir d’autres paramètres, exécuter les fonctions d’une interface d’utilisateur, et faire un lien vers des infrastructures de plus haut niveau et d’autres parties prenantes. La réduction de la consommation d'énergie d’un RCSF est un des aspects les plus importants qui doit être amélioré lors de sa conception. Cet aspect peut impliquer le développement de protocoles de Contrôles d'Accès au Support (CAS, Media Access Control en anglais ou MAC), protocoles de transport et de routage plus efficients. Le contrôle de la congestion est un autre des facteurs les plus importants dans la conception d’un RCSF, parce que la congestion influe directement sur la Qualité De Service (QDS, Quality of Service en anglais ou QoS) et l’efficience en énergie du réseau. La congestion dans un RCSF peut produire une grande perte de paquets et une haute consommation d’énergie. La QDS est directement impactée par la perte de paquets. L’implémentation de mesures additionnelles est nécessaire pour atténuer l’impact sur la communication des RCSF. Les protocoles de CAS pour RCSF devraient permettre aux capteurs corporels d’accéder rapidement au canal de communication et d’envoyer les données au hub, surtout pour les événements urgents tout en réduisant la consommation d’énergie. Les protocoles de transport pour RCSF doivent fournir de la fiabilité bout-à-bout et de la QDS pour tout le réseau. Cette tâche peut être accomplie par la réduction du ratio de perte de paquets (Packet Loss Ratio en anglais ou PLR) et de la latence tout en gardant l'équité et la faible consommation d'énergie entre les noeuds. Le standard IEEE 802.15.6 suggère un protocole de CAS qui est destiné à être applicable à tous les types de RCSF; toutefois, ce protocole peut être amélioré pour les RCSF utilisés dans le domaine du sport, où la gestion du trafic pourrait être différente d’autres réseaux. Le standard IEEE 802.15.6 comprend la QDS, mais cela ne suggère aucun protocole de transport ou système de contrôle du débit. Le but principal de ce projet de recherche est de concevoir une architecture pour RCSF en trois phases : (i) Conception d’un mécanisme sensible au contexte et efficient en énergie pour fournir une QDS aux RCSF; (ii) Conception d’un mécanisme fiable et efficient en énergie pour fournir une récupération des paquets perdus et de l’équité dans les RCSF; et (iii) Conception d’un système de contrôle du débit sensible au contexte pour fournir un contrôle de congestion aux RCSF. Finalement, ce projet de recherche propose une architecture fiable, sensible au contexte et efficiente en énergie pour RCSF utilisés dans le domaine du sport. Cette architecture fait face à quatre défis : l'efficacité de l'énergie, la sensibilité au contexte, la qualité de service et la fiabilité. La mise en place de cette solution aidera à l’amélioration des compétences, de la performance, de l’endurance et des protocoles d’entraînement des athlètes, ainsi qu’à la détection des points faibles. Cette solution pourrait être prolongée à l’amélioration de la qualité de vie des enfants, des personnes malades ou âgées, ou encore aux domaines militaires, de la sécurité et du divertissement. L’évaluation des protocoles et schémas proposés a été faite par simulations programmées avec le simulateur OMNeT++ et le système Castalia. Premièrement, le protocole de CAS proposé a été comparé avec les protocoles de CAS suivants : IEEE 802.15.6, IEEE 802.15.4 et T-MAC (Timeout MAC). Deuxièmement, le protocole de CAS proposé a été comparé avec le standard IEEE 802.15.6 avec et sans l’utilisation du protocole de transport proposé. Finalement, le protocole de CAS proposé et le standard IEEE 802.15.6 ont été comparés avec et sans l’utilisation du système de contrôle du débit proposé. Le protocole de CAS proposé surpasse les protocoles de CAS IEEE 802.15.6, IEEE 802.15.4 et T-MAC dans le pourcentage de pertes de paquets d’urgence et normaux, l’efficacité en énergie, et la latence du trafic d’urgence et du trafic normal. Le protocole de CAS proposé utilisé avec le protocole du transport proposé surpasse la performance du standard IEEE 802.15.6 dans le pourcentage de perte de paquets avec ou sans trafic d’urgence, l’efficacité en énergie, et la latence du trafic normal. Le système de contrôle du débit proposé a amélioré la performance du protocole de CAS proposé et du standard IEEE 802.15.6 dans le pourcentage de perte de paquets avec ou sans trafic d’urgence, l’efficacité en énergie, et la latence du trafic d’urgence.----------ABSTRACT Information collected from body sensors in a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is sent to a hub or coordinator which processes the information and can also perform other functions such as managing body events, merging data from sensors, sensing other parameters, performing the functions of a user interface and bridging the WBAN to higher-level infrastructure and other stakeholders. The reduction of the power consumption of a WBAN is one of the most important aspects to be improved when designing a WBAN. This challenge might imply the development of more efficient Medium Access Control (MAC), transport and routing protocols. Congestion control is another of the most important factors when a WBAN is designed, due to its direct impact in the Quality of Service (QoS) and the energy efficiency of the network. The presence of congestion in a WBAN can produce a big packet loss and high energy consumption. The QoS is also impacted directly by the packet loss. The implementation of additional measures is necessary to mitigate the impact on WBAN communications. The MAC protocols for WBANs should allow body sensors to get quick access to the channel and send data to the hub, especially in emergency events while reducing the power consumption. The transport protocols for WBANs must provide end-to-end reliability and QoS for the whole network. This task can be accomplished through the reduction of both the Packet Loss Ratio (PLR) and the latency while keeping fairness and low power consumption between nodes. The IEEE 802.15.6 standard suggests a MAC protocol which is intended to be applicable for all kinds of WBANs. Nonetheless, it could be improved for sports WBANs where the traffic-types handling could be different from other networks. The IEEE 802.15.6 standard supports QoS, but it does not suggest any transport protocol or rate control scheme. The main objective of this research project is to design an architecture for WBANs in three phases: (i) Designing a context-aware and energy-efficient mechanism for providing QoS in WBANs; (ii) Designing a reliable and energy-efficient mechanism to provide packet loss recovery and fairness in WBANs; and (iii) Designing a context-aware rate control scheme to provide congestion control in WBANs. Finally, this research project proposes a reliable, context-aware and energy-efficient architecture for WBANs used in sports applications, facing four challenges: energy efficiency, context awareness, quality of service and reliability. The benefits of this solution will help to improve skills, performance, endurance and training protocols of athletes, and deficiency detection. Also, it could be extended to enhance the quality of life of children, ill and elderly people, and to security, military and entertainment fields. The evaluation of the proposed protocols and schemes was made through simulations programed in the OMNeT++ simulator and the Castalia framework. First, the proposed MAC protocol was compared against the IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol, the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol and the T-MAC (Timeout MAC) protocol. Second, the proposed MAC protocol was compared with the IEEE 802.15.6 standard with and without the use of the proposed transport protocol. Finally, both the proposed MAC protocol and the IEEE 802.15.6 standard were compared with and without the use of the proposed rate control scheme. The proposed MAC protocol outperforms the IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol, the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol and the T-MAC protocol in the percentage of emergency and normal packet loss, the energy effectiveness, and the latency of emergency and normal traffic. The proposed MAC protocol working along with the proposed transport protocol outperforms the IEEE 802.15.6 standard in the percentage of the packet loss with or without emergency traffic, the energy effectiveness, and the latency of normal traffic. The proposed rate control scheme improved the performance of both the proposed MAC protocol and the IEEE 802.15.6 standard in the percentage of the packet loss with or without emergency traffic, the energy effectiveness and the latency of emergency traffic

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

Applications of the Internet of Medical Things to Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus

Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (DM1) is a condition of the metabolism typified by persistent hyperglycemia as a result of insufficient pancreatic insulin synthesis. This requires patients to be aware of their blood glucose level oscillations every day to deduce a pattern and anticipate future glycemia, and hence, decide the amount of insulin that must be exogenously injected to maintain glycemia within the target range. This approach often suffers from a relatively high imprecision, which can be dangerous. Nevertheless, current developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and innovative sensors for biological signals that might enable a continuous, complete assessment of the patient’s health provide a fresh viewpoint on treating DM1. With this, we observe that current biomonitoring devices and Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) units can easily obtain data that allow us to know at all times the state of glycemia and other variables that influence its oscillations. A complete review has been made of the variables that influence glycemia in a T1DM patient and that can be measured by the above means. The communications systems necessary to transfer the information collected to a more powerful computational environment, which can adequately handle the amounts of data collected, have also been described. From this point, intelligent data analysis extracts knowledge from the data and allows predictions to be made in order to anticipate risk situations. With all of the above, it is necessary to build a holistic proposal that allows the complete and smart management of T1DM. This approach evaluates a potential shortage of such suggestions and the obstacles that future intelligent IoMT-DM1 management systems must surmount. Lastly, we provide an outline of a comprehensive IoMT-based proposal for DM1 management that aims to address the limits of prior studies while also using the disruptive technologies highlighted beforePartial funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málag

Abstracting information on body area networks

Healthcare is changing, correction...healthcare is in need of change. The population ageing, the increase in chronic and heart diseases and just the increase in population size will overwhelm the current hospital-centric healthcare. There is a growing interest by individuals to monitor their own physiology. Not only for sport activities, but also to control their own diseases. They are changing from the passive healthcare receiver to a proactive self-healthcare taker. The focus is shifting from hospital centred treatment to a patient-centric healthcare monitoring. Continuous, everyday, wearable monitoring and actuating is part of this change. In this setting, sensors that monitor the heart, blood pressure, movement, brain activity, dopamine levels, and actuators that pump insulin, “pump” the heart, deliver drugs to specific organs, stimulate the brain are needed as pervasive components in and on the body. They will tend for people’s need of self-monitoring and facilitate healthcare delivery. These components around a human body that communicate to sense and act in a coordinated fashion make a Body Area Network (BAN). In most cases, and in our view, a central, more powerful component will act as the coordinator of this network. These networks aim to augment the power to monitor the human body and react to problems discovered with this observation. One key advantage of this system is their overarching view of the whole network. That is, the central component can have an understanding of all the monitored signals and correlate them to better evaluate and react to problems. This is the focus of our thesis. In this document we argue that this multi-parameter correlation of the heterogeneous sensed information is not being handled in BANs. The current view depends exclusively on the applica- tion that is using the network and its understanding of the parameters. This means that every application will oversee the BAN’s heterogeneous resources managing them directly without taking into consideration other applications, their needs and knowledge. There are several physiological correlations already known by the medical field. Correlating blood pressure and cross sectional area of blood vessels to calculate blood velocity, estimating oxygen delivery from cardiac output and oxygen saturation, are such examples. This knowledge should be available in a BAN and shared by the several applications that make use of the network. This architecture implies a central component that manages the knowledge and the resources. And this is, in our view, missing in BANs. Our proposal is a middleware layer that abstracts the underlying BAN’s resources to the applica- tion, providing instead an information model to be queried. The model describes the correlations for producing new information that the middleware knows about. Naturally, the raw sensed data is also part of the model. The middleware hides the specificities of the nodes that constitute the BAN, by making available their sensed production. Applications are able to query for information attaching requirements to these requests. The middleware is then responsible for satisfying the requests while optimising the resource usage of the BAN. Our architecture proposal is divided in two corresponding layers, one that abstracts the nodes’ hardware (hiding node’s particularities) and the information layer that describes information available and how it is correlated. A prototype implementation of the architecture was done to illustrate the concept.This work was partially supported by PhD scholarship SFRH/BD/28843/2006 from Fundação da Ciência e Tecnologia from Portugal

A patient agent controlled customized blockchain based framework for internet of things

Although Blockchain implementations have emerged as revolutionary technologies for various industrial applications including cryptocurrencies, they have not been widely deployed to store data streaming from sensors to remote servers in architectures known as Internet of Things. New Blockchain for the Internet of Things models promise secure solutions for eHealth, smart cities, and other applications. These models pave the way for continuous monitoring of patient’s physiological signs with wearable sensors to augment traditional medical practice without recourse to storing data with a trusted authority. However, existing Blockchain algorithms cannot accommodate the huge volumes, security, and privacy requirements of health data. In this thesis, our first contribution is an End-to-End secure eHealth architecture that introduces an intelligent Patient Centric Agent. The Patient Centric Agent executing on dedicated hardware manages the storage and access of streams of sensors generated health data, into a customized Blockchain and other less secure repositories. As IoT devices cannot host Blockchain technology due to their limited memory, power, and computational resources, the Patient Centric Agent coordinates and communicates with a private customized Blockchain on behalf of the wearable devices. While the adoption of a Patient Centric Agent offers solutions for addressing continuous monitoring of patients’ health, dealing with storage, data privacy and network security issues, the architecture is vulnerable to Denial of Services(DoS) and single point of failure attacks. To address this issue, we advance a second contribution; a decentralised eHealth system in which the Patient Centric Agent is replicated at three levels: Sensing Layer, NEAR Processing Layer and FAR Processing Layer. The functionalities of the Patient Centric Agent are customized to manage the tasks of the three levels. Simulations confirm protection of the architecture against DoS attacks. Few patients require all their health data to be stored in Blockchain repositories but instead need to select an appropriate storage medium for each chunk of data by matching their personal needs and preferences with features of candidate storage mediums. Motivated by this context, we advance third contribution; a recommendation model for health data storage that can accommodate patient preferences and make storage decisions rapidly, in real-time, even with streamed data. The mapping between health data features and characteristics of each repository is learned using machine learning. The Blockchain’s capacity to make transactions and store records without central oversight enables its application for IoT networks outside health such as underwater IoT networks where the unattended nature of the nodes threatens their security and privacy. However, underwater IoT differs from ground IoT as acoustics signals are the communication media leading to high propagation delays, high error rates exacerbated by turbulent water currents. Our fourth contribution is a customized Blockchain leveraged framework with the model of Patient-Centric Agent renamed as Smart Agent for securely monitoring underwater IoT. Finally, the smart Agent has been investigated in developing an IoT smart home or cities monitoring framework. The key algorithms underpinning to each contribution have been implemented and analysed using simulators.Doctor of Philosoph

Reliable and Energy Efficient Network Protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks

In a wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) various sensors are attached on clothing, on the body or are even implanted under the skin. The wireless nature of the network and the wide variety of sensors offers numerous new, practical and innovative applications. A motivating example can be found in the world of health monitoring. The sensors of the 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 a hospital. A WBAN imposes the networks some strict and specific requirements. The devices are tiny, leaving only limited space for a battery. It is therefore of uttermost importance to restrict the energy consumption in the network. A possible solution is the development of energy efficient protocols that regulate the communication between the radios. Further, it is also important to consider the reliability of the communication. The data sent contains medical information and one has to make sure that it is correctly received at the personal device. It is not allowed that a critical message gets lost. In addition, a WBAN has to support the heterogeneity of its devices. This thesis focuses on the development of energy efficient and reliable network protocols for WBANs. Considered solutions are the use of multi-hop communication and the improved interaction between the different network layers. Mechanisms to reduce the energy consumption and to grade up the reliability of the communication are presented. In a first step, the physical layer of the communication near the human body is studied and investigated. The probability of a connection between two nodes on the body is modeled and used to investigate which network topologies can be considered as the most energy efficient and reliable. Next, MOFBAN, a lightweight framework for network architecture is presented. Finally, CICADA is presented: a new cross layer protocol for WBANs that both handles channel medium access and routing

Human exposure to electromagnetic fields from WLANs and WBANs in the 2.4 GHz band

226 p.En los últimos años, el masivo crecimiento de las comunicaciones inalámbricas ha incrementado la preocupación acerca de la exposición humana a los campos electromagnéticos debido a los posibles efectos sobre la salud. Esta tesis surge de la necesidad de proporcionar información acerca de este tipo de exposición desde un punto de vista técnico. Por una parte, se han estudiado los niveles de exposición causados por señales WiFi, para lo cual ha sido necesario establecer un procedimiento de medida adecuado para tomar muestras de estas emisiones. Además, se han llevado a cabo campañas de medida para evaluar la exposición a señales WiFi y su variabilidad en el interior de un entorno público. Por otra parte, se ha analizado la potencia absorbida por el cuerpo humano a causa de los novedosos dispositivos wearables. Se han implementado dos antenas de este tipo, apropiadas para dispositivos wearables, se ha analizado detalladamente la exposición debida a estos aparatos y finalmente se han comparado los niveles de exposición producidos por estas antenas y por las señales WiFi

New Waves of IoT Technologies Research – Transcending Intelligence and Senses at the Edge to Create Multi Experience Environments

The next wave of Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) brings new technological developments that incorporate radical advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), edge computing processing, new sensing capabilities, more security protection and autonomous functions accelerating progress towards the ability for IoT systems to self-develop, self-maintain and self-optimise. The emergence of hyper autonomous IoT applications with enhanced sensing, distributed intelligence, edge processing and connectivity, combined with human augmentation, has the potential to power the transformation and optimisation of industrial sectors and to change the innovation landscape. This chapter is reviewing the most recent advances in the next wave of the IoT by looking not only at the technology enabling the IoT but also at the platforms and smart data aspects that will bring intelligence, sustainability, dependability, autonomy, and will support human-centric solutions.acceptedVersio

A holistic architecture using peer to peer (P2P) protocols for the internet of things and wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) interact with the physical world using sensing and/or actuation. The wireless capability of WSN nodes allows them to be deployed close to the sensed phenomenon. Cheaper processing power and the use of micro IP stacks allow nodes to form an “Internet of Things” (IoT) integrating the physical world with the Internet in a distributed system of devices and applications. Applications using the sensor data may be located across the Internet from the sensor network, allowing Cloud services and Big Data approaches to store and analyse this data in a scalable manner, supported by new approaches in the area of fog and edge computing. Furthermore, the use of protocols such as the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and data models such as IPSO Smart Objects have supported the adoption of IoT in a range of scenarios. IoT has the potential to become a realisation of Mark Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing where tiny networked computers become woven into everyday life. This presents the challenge of being able to scale the technology down to resource-constrained devices and to scale it up to billions of devices. This will require seamless interoperability and abstractions that can support applications on Cloud services and also on node devices with constrained computing and memory capabilities, limited development environments and requirements on energy consumption. This thesis proposes a holistic architecture using concepts from tuple-spaces and overlay Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. This architecture is termed as holistic, because it considers the flow of the data from sensors through to services. The key contributions of this work are: development of a set of architectural abstractions to provide application layer interoperability, a novel cache algorithm supporting leases, a tuple-space based data store for local and remote data and a Peer to Peer (P2P) protocol with an innovative use of a DHT in building an overlay network. All these elements are designed for implementation on a resource constrained node and to be extensible to server environments, which is shown in a prototype implementation. This provides the basis for a new P2P holistic approach that will allow Wireless Sensor Networks and IoT to operate in a self-organising ad hoc manner in order to deliver the promise of IoT