Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN): A Survey on Reliability, Fault Tolerance, and Technologies Coexistence

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has been a key element in e-health to monitor bodies. This technology enables new applications under the umbrella of different domains, including the medical field, the entertainment and ambient intelligence areas. This survey paper places substantial emphasis on the concept and key features of the WBAN technology. First, the WBAN concept is introduced and a review of key applications facilitated by this networking technology is provided. The study then explores a wide variety of communication standards and methods deployed in this technology. Due to the sensitivity and criticality of the data carried and handled by WBAN, fault tolerance is a critical issue and widely discussed in this paper. Hence, this survey investigates thoroughly the reliability and fault tolerance paradigms suggested for WBANs. Open research and challenging issues pertaining to fault tolerance, coexistence and interference management and power consumption are also discussed along with some suggested trends in these aspect

Fault tolerance in WBAN applications

One of the most promising applications of IoT is Wireless Body Area Net-works (WBANs) in medical applications. They allow physiological signals monitoring of patients without the presence of nearby medical personnel. Furthermore, WBANs enable feedback action to be taken either periodically or event-based following the Networked Control Systems (NCSs) techniques. This thesis first presents the architecture of a fault tolerant WBAN. Sensors data are sent over two redundant paths to be processed, analyzed and monitored. The two main communication protocols utilized in this system are Low power Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11n) and Long Term Evolution (LTE). Riverbed Modeler is used to study the system’s behavior. Simulation results are collected with 95% confidence analysis on 33 runs on different initial seeds. It is proven that the system is fully operational. It is then shown that the system can withstand interference and system’s performance is quantified. Results indicate that the system succeeds in meeting all required control criteria in the presence of two different interference models. The second contribution of this thesis is the design of an FPGA-based smart band for health monitoring applications in WBANs. This FPGA-based smart band has a softcore processor and its allocated SRAM block as well as auxiliary modules. A novel scheme for full initial configuration and Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration through the WLAN network is integrated into this design. Fault tolerance techniques are used to mitigate transient faults such as Single Event Upsets (SEUs) and Multiple Event Upsets (MEUs). The system is studied in a normal environment as well as in a harsh environment. System availability is then obtained using Markov Models and a case study is presented

Mitigation of packet loss with end-to-end delay in wireless body area network applications

The wireless body area network (WBAN) has been proposed to offer a solution to the problem of population ageing, shortage in medical facilities and different chronic diseases. The development of this technology has been further fueled by the demand for real-time application for monitoring these cases in networks. The integrity of communication is constrained by the loss of packets during communication affecting the reliability of WBAN. Mitigating the loss of packets and ensuring the performance of the network is a challenging task that has sparked numerous studies over the years. The WBAN technology as a problem of reducing network lifetime; thus, in this paper, we utilize cooperative routing protocol (CRP) to improve package delivery via end-to-end latency and increase the length of the network lifetime. The end-to-end latency was used as a metric to determine the significance of CRP in WBAN routing protocols. The CRP increased the rate of transmission of packets to the sink and mitigate packet loss. The proposed solution has shown that the end-to-end delay in the WBAN is considerably reduced by applying the cooperative routing protocol. The CRP technique attained a delivery ratio of 0.8176 compared to 0.8118 when transmitting packets in WBAN

Wireless body area network mobility-aware task offloading scheme

The increasing amount of user equipment (UE) and the rapid advances in wireless body area networks bring revolutionary changes in healthcare systems. However, due to the strict requirements on size, reliability and battery lifetime of UE devices, it is difficult for them to execute latency sensitive or computation intensive tasks effectively. In this paper, we aim to enhance the UE computation capacity by utilizing small size coordinator-based mobile edge computing (C-MEC) servers. In this way, the system complexity, computation resources, and energy consumption are considerably transferred from the UE to the C-MEC, which is a practical approach since C-MEC is power charged, in contrast to the UE. First, the system architecture and the mobility model are presented. Second, several transmission mechanisms are analyzed along with the proposed mobility-aware cooperative task offloading scheme. Numerous selected performance metrics are investigated regarding the number of executed tasks, the percentage of failed tasks, average service time, and the energy consumption of each MEC. The results validate the advantage of task offloading schemes compared with the traditional relay-based technique regarding the number of executed tasks. Moreover, one can obtain that the proposed scheme archives noteworthy benefits, such as low latency and efficiently balance the energy consumption of C-MECs

PEMANTAUAN KONDISI TUBUH BERBASIS ARDUINO DAN RASPBERRY PI UNTUK PENGENDALIAN KONDISI RUANGAN

A cozy room should adjust its environment based on the condition of its occupants since it will indirectly affect the moods and body conditions of people inside. This study aims to develop a system for monitoring the human body condition using paired sensors on the Arduino Lilypad. The system will send the sensors data to the Raspberry Pi3 via Bluetooth to automatically control the electronic device inside the room based on the occupant body condition. The developed system will automatically turn on or turn off the electronic device when the body temperature or the heart rate is higher than the specified threshold value. Keywords: Lilypad, Raspberry, body senso

Design and performance analysis of human body communication digital transceiver for wireless body area network applications

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a prominent technology for resolving health-care concerns and providing high-speed continuous monitoring and real-time help. Human body communication (HBC) is an IEEE 802.15.6 physical layer standard for short-range communications that is not reliant on radio frequency (RF). Most WBAN applications can benefit from the HBC's low-latency and low-power architectural features. In this manuscript, an efficient digital HBC transceiver (TR) hardware architecture is designed as per IEEE 802.15.6 standard to overcome the drawbacks of the RF-wireless communication standards like signal leakage, on body antenna and power consumption. The design is created using a frequency selective digital transmission scheme for transmitter and receiver modules. The design resources are analyzed using different field programmable gate array (FPGA) families. The HBC TR utilizes <1% slices, consumes 101 mW power, and provides a throughput of 24.31 Mbps on Artix-7 FPGA with a latency of 10.5 clock cycles. In addition, the less than 10-4bit error rate of HBC is achieved with a 9.52 Mbps data rate. The proposed work is compared with existing architectures with significant improvement in performance parameters like chip area, power, and data rate

Delay Tolerant Energy Efficient protocol for Inter-BAN Communication in Mobile Body Area Networks

Body Area Networks (BANs) are used in a range of applications. In these networks the sensor nodes attached to human body collect data and send it to controller node which in turn sends to a Base Station (BS) located at a remote location. The controller nodes in a BAN can be replaced easily but when it comes to BANs moving in areas like a war it is hard to replace the batteries frequently. So we need to reduce energy requirement of the nodes to increase the network lifetime. Using mobile sensors is one way to reduce energy and controller nodes can send data to sink easily while performing inter-BAN communication where nodes need to act in a cooperative manner to send data to BS using multi-hop communication. In this paper, we have proposed a new clustering algorithm in which probability of a node to become a Cluster Head (CH) is decided on the basis of its geographical location and residual energy of the node. Simulations results show that the proposed protocol is better than the existing EDDEEC protocol in terms of delay, energy efficiency, reliability and network lifetime.

QoS in Body Area Networks: A survey

Body Area Networks (BANs) are becoming increasingly popular and have shown great potential in real-time monitoring of the human body. With the promise of being cost-effective and unobtrusive and facilitating continuous monitoring, BANs have attracted a wide range of monitoring applications, including medical and healthcare, sports, and rehabilitation systems. Most of these applications are real time and life critical and require a strict guarantee of Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of timeliness, reliability, and so on. Recently, there has been a number of proposals describing diverse approaches or frameworks to achieve QoS in BANs (i.e., for different layers or tiers and different protocols). This survey put these individual efforts into perspective and presents a more holistic view of the area. In this regard, this article identifies a set of QoS requirements for BAN applications and shows how these requirements are linked in a three-tier BAN system and presents a comprehensive review of the existing proposals against those requirements. In addition, open research issues, challenges, and future research directions in achieving these QoS in BANs are highlighted.</jats:p