• ETRI Journal
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.299-309
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• 2011

Energy consumption is a key issue in body sensor networks (BSNs) since energy-constrained sensors monitor the vital signs of human beings in healthcare applications. In this paper, packet size optimization for BSNs has been analyzed to improve the efficiency of energy consumption. Existing studies on packet size optimization in wireless sensor networks cannot be applied to BSNs because the different operational characteristics of nodes and the channel effects of in-body and on-body propagation cannot be captured. In this paper, automatic repeat request (ARQ), forward error correction (FEC) block codes, and FEC convolutional codes have been analyzed regarding their energy efficiency. The hop-length extension technique has been applied to improve this metric with FEC block codes. The theoretical analysis and the numerical evaluations reveal that exploiting FEC schemes improves the energy efficiency, increases the optimal payload packet size, and extends the hop length for all scenarios for in-body and on-body propagation.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.8
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• pp.1961-1972
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• 2014

Recently, with the increasing of the interest in the integration of medical technology and information communication technology, researches on WBAN (Wireless Body Area Networks) that try to apply sensor network to the human body have been processed actively. The existing sensor network technology has the potential to be used in WBAN, but it has some limitations also. In particular, because the sensors are likely to communicate through each part of the body, it has a very different network environment from the sensor network that uses a free space. Therefore, researches on WBAN have a variety area of study that slightly different from the conventional sensor networks and take into account the characteristics of the body. In this study, we investigate the environmental characteristics of WBAN that are separated from the conventional sensor network, and the research trends of WBAN systematically by using the technique of SLR (Systematic Literature Review) from 2001 around when the concept of WBAN has been introduced. The investigation includes the classification of research and the researcher's features. And the survey results and the outlook for further study are summarized.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.160-166
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• 2011

In u-healthcare services based on wireless body sensor networks, reliable connection is very important as many types of information, including vital signals, are transmitted through the networks. The transmit power requirements are very stringent in the case of in-body networks for implant communication. Furthermore, the wireless link in an in-body environment has a high degree of path loss (e.g., the path loss exponent is around 6.2 for deep tissue). Because of such inherently bad settings of the communication nodes, a multi-hop network topology is preferred in order to meet the transmit power requirements and to increase the battery lifetime of sensor nodes. This will ensure that the live body of a patient receiving the healthcare service has a reduced level of specific absorption ratio (SAR) when exposed to long-lasting radiation. We propose an efficientmethod for delivering delay-intolerant data packets over multiple hops. We consider forward error correction (FEC) in an erasure correction mode and develop a mathematical formulation for packet-level scheduling of delay-intolerant FEC packets over multiple hops. The proposed method can be used as a simple guideline for applications to setting up a topology for a medical body sensor network of each individual patient, which is connected to a remote server for u-healthcare service applications.

• KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
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• v.5 no.6
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• pp.127-134
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• 2016

WBSN (Wireless Body Sensor Network), also called WBAN (Wireless Body Area Networks) generally, is a kind of WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) applications, which is composed of the various sensor nodes residing in human body embodied or in wearable way. The measured data at each sensor node in WBSN requires being synchronized at sink node for exact analysis for status of human body, which is like WSN. Although many time synchronization protocols for WSN has been already developed, they are not appropriate to WBSN. In this paper, a new time synchronization protocol for WBSN considering the characteristics of WBSN is proposed. The proposed scheme is not only simple, but also consumes less power, leading to increasing network life time. We will show that the proposed scheme is appropriate to WBSN by evaluating its performance by simulation.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.1014-1035
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• 2013

With recent advances in wireless communication and low-power miniaturized biomedical sensor and semiconductor technologies, wireless body area networks (WBAN) has become an integral part of the disaster aid system. Wearable vital sign sensors can track patients' status and location, thus enhancing disaster rescue efficiency. In the past few years, most of the literatures in the area of disaster aid system based on WBAN have focused on issues concerning wireless sensor design, sensor miniaturization, energy efficiency and communication protocols. In this paper, we will give an overview of disaster aid, discuss about the types of network communication as well as outline related issues. We will emphasize on analyzing six key issues in employing the disaster aid system. Finally, we will also highlight some of the challenges that still need to be addressed in the future in order to help the disaster aid system be truly and widely accepted by the public.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.105-116
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• 2019

Recently, there has been an increase in research on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) because they are easy to deploy in applications such as internet-of-things (IoT) and body area networks. However, WSNs have constraints in terms of power, quality-of-service (QoS), computation, and others. To overcome the power constraint issues, wireless energy harvesting has been introduced into WSNs, the application of which has been the focus of many studies. Additionally, to improve system performance in terms of achievable rate, cooperative networks are also being explored in WSNs. We present a review on current research in the area of energy harvesting in WSNs, specifically on the application of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in a cooperative sensor network. In addition, we discuss possible future extensions of SWIPT and cooperative networks in WSNs.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.28-32
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• 2014

It is practical nowadays to automate data recording in order to prevent loss and tampering of records. There are existing technologies that satisfy this needs and one of them is wireless sensor networks (WSN). Wireless body sensor networks (WBSN) are wireless networks and information-processing systems which are deployed to monitor medical condition of patients. In terms of performance, WBSNs are restricted by energy, and communication between nodes. In this paper, we focused in improving the performance of communication to achieve less energy consumption and to save power. The main idea of this paper is to prioritize nodes that exhibit a sudden change of vital signs that could put the patient at risk. Cluster head is the main focus of this study in order to be effective; its main role is to check the sent data of the patient that exceeds threshold then transfer to the sink node. The proposed scheme implemented added a time-based protocol to sleep/wakeup mechanism for the sensor nodes. We seek to achieve a low energy consumption and significant throughput in this study.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.31-39
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• 2021

One of the major challenges in wireless body area networks (WBANs) is sensor fault detection. This paper reports a method for the precise identification of faulty sensors, which should help users identify true medical conditions and reduce the rate of false alarms, thereby improving the quality of services offered by WBANs. The proposed sensor fault detection (SFD) algorithm is based on Pearson correlation coefficients and simple statistical methods. The proposed method identifies strongly correlated parameters using Pearson correlation coefficients, and the proposed SFD algorithm detects faulty sensors. We validated the proposed SFD algorithm using two datasets from the Multiparameter Intelligent Monitoring in Intensive Care database and compared the results to those of existing methods. The time complexity of the proposed algorithm was also compared to that of existing methods. The proposed algorithm achieved high detection rates and low false alarm rates with accuracies of 97.23% and 93.99% for Dataset 1 and Dataset 2, respectively.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.23-51
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• 2010

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have proved to be useful in applications that involve monitoring of real-time data. There is a wide variety of monitoring applications that can employ Wireless Sensor Network. Characteristics of a WSN, such as topology and scale, depend upon the application, for which it is employed. Security requirements in WSN vary according to the application dependent network characteristics and the characteristics of an application itself. Key management is the most important aspect of security as some other security modules depend on it. We discuss application dependent variations in WSN, corresponding changes in the security requirements of WSN and the applicability of existing key management solutions in each scenario.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.453-462
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• 2015

Body area networks (BANs) have emerged as an enabling technique for e-healthcare systems, which can be used to continuously and remotely monitor patients' health. In BANs, the data of a patient's vital body functions and movements can be collected by small wearable or implantable sensors and sent using shortrange wireless communication techniques. Due to the shared wireless medium between the sensors in BANs, it may be possible to have malicious attacks on e-healthcare systems. The security and privacy issues of BANs are becoming more and more important. To provide secure and correct association of a group of sensors with a patient and satisfy the requirements of data confidentiality and integrity in BANs, we propose a novel enhanced secure sensor association and key management protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography and hash chains. The authentication procedure and group key generation are very simple and efficient. Therefore, our protocol can be easily implemented in the power and resource constrained sensor nodes in BANs. From a comparison of results, furthermore, we can conclude that the proposed protocol dramatically reduces the computation and communication cost for the authentication and key derivation compared with previous protocols. We believe that our protocol is attractive in the application of BANs.