A Low-delay Protocol for Multihop Wireless Body Area Networks

2006

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have gained a lot of interest in the world of medical monitoring. Current implementations generally use a large single hop network to connect all sensors to a personal server. However recent research pointed out that multihop networks are more energy-efficient and even necessary when applied near the human body with inherent severe propagation loss. In this paper we present a slotted multihop approach to medium access control and routing in wireless body area networks, the Wireless Autonomous Spanning tree Protocol or WASP. It uses crosslayer techniques to achieve efficient distributed coordination of the separated wireless links. Traffic in the network is controlled by setting up a spanning tree and by broadcasting scheme messages over it that are used both by the parent and the children of each node in the tree. We analyze the performance of WASP and show the simulation results.

International Journal of Advanced Research, 2019

2016 IEEE/ACS 13th International Conference of Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA), 2016

The rapid development of medical sensors has increased the interest in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications where physiological data from the human body and its environment is gathered, monitored, and analyzed to take the proper measures. In WBANs, it is essential to design MAC protocols that ensure adequate Quality of Service (QoS) such as low delay and high scalability. This paper investigates Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols used in WBAN, and compares their performance in a high traffic environment. Such scenario can be induced in case of emergency for example, where physiological data collected from all sensors on human body should be sent simultaneously to take appropriate action. This study can also be extended to cover collaborative WBAN systems where information from different bodies is sent simultaneously leading to high traffic. OPNET simulations are performed to compare the delay and scalability performance of the different MAC protocols under the same experimental conditions and to draw conclusions about the best protocol to be used in a high traffic environment.

Technological and Social Perspectives, 2010

Conventional wired body sensor networks have been used in hospitals over the last decade; however, the tethered operation restricts the mobility of the patients. In the scenario considered in this chapter, the signals collected from the patients' bodies are wirelessly transmitted to a base station, and then delivered to a remote diagnosis centre through a communication infrastructure, enabling full mobility of the patient in the coverage area of the wireless network. Healthcare applications require the network to satisfy demanding requirements in terms of quality of service (QoS) and, at the same time, minimize the energy consumption of the sensor nodes. The traffic generated by data-intensive healthcare applications may lead to frequent collisions between sensor nodes and the consequent loss of data, if conventional MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks are used. Therefore, this chapter presents LPRT and CCMAC, two MAC protocols that intend to satisfy the QoS requirements of these applications, but differ in the wireless topology used. Experimental results for an implementation of the LPRT using an IEEE 802.15.4 compliant wireless sensor platform are presented, as well as simulation results comparing the performance of direct communication (between wireless body sensor nodes and the base station) with two other approaches relying on a cluster-based topology (similar to the one proposed by the authors of LEACH), which demonstrate the benefits of using a cluster-based topology on wireless healthcare applications.

Wireless Personal Communications, 2017

A number of tiny sensor nodes are strategically placed in and around the human body to obtain physiological information. The sensor nodes are connected to a coordinator or a data collector to form a wireless body area network (WBAN). WBAN consists of variety of medical and non-medical applications with aggregate data rate requirement ranging from few bytes per second to 10 Mbps. These applications are having relatively different energy saving, reliability and quality of service (QoS) requirements. For example, emergency medical data are highly erratic but should be transferred with high reliability and minimum delay, whereas electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram applications are constant bit rate traffic which need to be transferred with moderate reliability. Additionally, non-medical applications include variable bit rate traffic and their jitter and delay requirements must also be met. On the above, a sensor node should spend minimum energy and conserve power to increase its life time in the network. The existing media access control (MAC) protocols present in various short and medium range wireless technologies such as 802.11 and 802.15.4 have been designed for specific purposes, and therefore, do not fulfill the diverse performance requirements across all WBAN applications. In this paper, we propose a poll-based MAC protocol, PMAC for WBAN, which can meet such diversified functional requirements of various WBAN applications. In particular, we introduce few concepts in polling based channel access mechanism to make an energy efficient and QoS aware MAC protocol. The design has been validated by obtaining the performance of proposed PMAC protocol through simulation.

International Journal on Advanced Science, Engineering and Information Technology, 2018

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 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 cooperatively 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 by its geographical location and residual energy of the node. Simulations results show that the proposed protocol is better than the existing EDDEEC protocol regarding the delay, energy efficiency, reliability and network lifetime.

2014 IEEE 28th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, 2014

Wireless sensor networks and, particularly wireless body area networks (WBANs) are the key building blocks of upcoming generation networks. Modern health care system is one of the most popular WBAN application and a hot area of research in subject to present work.In recent years, research has focused on channel modeling, energy conservation and design of efficient medium access control (MAC) schemes. Less attention has been paid to the path-loss performance analysis. In this work, we propose LAEEBA (Link-aware and Energy Efficient scheme for Body Area Networks) which is a reliable, pathloss efficient and high throughput routing protocol for WBANs.

ECTI Transactions on Computer and Information Technology, 2023

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are a collection of vital and electrical signals measured from various body parts to help analyze therapeutic approaches for patients using wireless data transmission. The signicant data has to communicate with collision avoidance to obtain high throughput. In this paper, a hybrid MAC layer communication is implemented between CSMA/CA and TDMA. CSMA/CA communication has been introduced to manage the TDMA sequence of transmissions without a central node. The experimental results in this system implement real wireless devices, TelosB, with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. We studied the convergence speed of transmission sequence allocation, which was measured in the CSMA/CA period. When the number of nodes is small, the convergence time is slower than a large number of nodes. However, the number of nodes does not aect the number of rounds entering the transmission period. This parameter has been evaluated for the network and energy eciency in WBANs. Packet delivery ratio, packet numbers, and energy consumption are examined for the dierent priority-based nodes in the TDMA period. The energy consumption can reduce to 40% for no priority when compared with high priority in the case of a priority-based node.

Sensors, 2012

The issues inherent in caring for an ever-increasing aged population has been the subject of endless debate and continues to be a hot topic for political discussion. The use of hospital-based facilities for the monitoring of chronic physiological conditions is expensive and ties up key healthcare professionals. The introduction of wireless sensor devices as part of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) integrated within an overall eHealth solution could bring a step change in the remote management of patient healthcare. Sensor devices small enough to be placed either inside or on the human body can form a vital part of an overall health monitoring network. An effectively designed energy efficient WBAN should have a minimal impact on the mobility and lifestyle of the patient. WBAN technology can be deployed within a hospital, care home environment or in the patient's own home. This study is a review of the existing research in the area of WBAN technology and in particular protocol adaptation and energy efficient cross-layer design. The research reviews the work carried out across various layers of the protocol stack and highlights how the latest research proposes to resolve the various challenges inherent in remote continual healthcare monitoring.

Network and Complex Systems, 2014

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) also referred to as a body sensor network (BSN), is a wireless network of wearable computing devices. It has emerged as a key technology to provide real-time health monitoring of a patient and diagnose many life threatening diseases. WBAN operates in close vicinity to, on, or inside a human body and supports a variety of medical and non-medical applications. The design of a medium access control is a challenge due to the characteristics of wireless channel and the need to fulfill both requirements of mobility support and energy efficiency. This paper presents a comparative study of IEEE 802.15.6, IEEE 804.15.4 and T-MAC in order to analyze the performance of each standard in terms of delay, throughput and energy consumption.