• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.10 no.9
• /
• pp.4188-4206
• /
• 2016

Power control is widely used to reduce co-channel interference in wireless networks and guarantee the signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of ongoing connections. This technique is also effective for wireless body area networks (WBANs). Although achieving satisfactory SINR is important for WBAN users, they may not be willing to achieve it at arbitrarily high power levels since power is a scarce resource in WBANs. Besides, for WBANs with different purposes, the QoS requirements and concern about the power consumption may be different. This motivates us to formulate the power control problem using the concepts from microeconomics and game theory. In this paper, the QoS objective is viewed as a utility function, which represents the degree of user satisfaction, while the power consumption is viewed as a cost function. The power control problem consequently becomes a non-cooperative multiplayer game, in which each player tries to maximize its net utility, i.e., the utility minus the cost. Within this framework, we investigate the Nash equilibrium existence and uniqueness in the game and derive the best response solution to reach the Nash equilibrium. To obtain the optimal transmission power in a distributed way, we further propose a utility-based and QoS-aware power control algorithm (UQoS-PCA). Tunable cost coefficient in UQoS-PCA enables this scheme to be flexible to satisfy diverse service requirements. Simulation results show the convergence and effectiveness of the proposed scheme as well as improvements over existing algorithm.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.6 no.9
• /
• pp.2302-2322
• /
• 2012

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are introduced as an enabling technology in tele-health for patient monitoring. Designing an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is the main challenge in WBANs because of their various applications and strict requirements such as low level of energy consumption, low transmission delay, the wide range of data rates and prioritizing emergency data. In this paper, we propose a new MAC protocol to provide different requirements of WBANs targeted for medical applications. The proposed MAC provides an efficient emergency response mechanism by considering the correlation between medical signals. It also reduces the power consumption of nodes by minimizing contention access, reducing the probability of the collision and using an efficient synchronization algorithm. In addition, the proposed MAC protocol increases the data rate of the nodes by allocating the resources according to the condition of the network. Analytical and simulation results show that the proposed MAC protocol outperforms IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol in terms of power consumption level as well as the average response delay. Also, the comparison results of the proposed MAC with IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol show a tradeoff between average response delay and medical data rate.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.15 no.7
• /
• pp.885-890
• /
• 2012

In this Paper, we propose a Real-Time Localization Platform Built on WUSB (Wireless USB) over WBAN (Wireless Body Area Networks) protocol required for Wearable Computer systems. Proposed Real-Time Localization Platform Technique is executed on the basis of WUSB over WBAN protocol at each sensor node comprising peripherals of a wearable computer system. In the Platform, a WUSB host calculates the location of a receiving sensor node by using the difference between the times at which the sensor node received different WBAN beacon frames sent from the WUSB host. And the WUSB host interprets motion of the virtual object.

• ETRI Journal
• /
• v.38 no.6
• /
• pp.1074-1084
• /
• 2016

This paper presents a transmission method for improving human body communications in terms of spectral efficiency, and the performances of bit-error-rate (BER) and frame synchronization, with a highly simplified structure. Compared to the conventional frequency selective digital transmission supporting IEEE standard 802.15.6 for wireless body area networks, the proposed scheme improves the spectral efficiency from 0.25 bps/Hz to 1 bps/Hz based on the 3-dB bandwidth of the transmit spectral mask, and the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) by 0.51 dB at a BER of $10^{-6}$ with an 87.5% reduction in the detection complexity of the length of the Hamming distance computation. The proposed preamble structure using its customized detection algorithm achieves perfect frame synchronization at the SNR of a BER of $10^{-6}$ by applying the proposed pre-processing to compensate for the distortions on the preamble signals due to the band-limit effects by transmit and receive filters.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
• /
• v.11 no.1
• /
• pp.7-11
• /
• 2013

Wearable computer systems use the wireless universal serial bus (WUSB), which refers to USB technology that is merged with WiMedia physical layer and medium access control layer (PHY/MAC) technical specifications. WUSB can be applied to wireless personal area network (WPAN) applications as well as wired USB applications such as PAN. WUSB specifications have defined high-speed connections between a WUSB host and WUSB devices for compatibility with USB 2.0 specifications. In this paper, we focus on an integrated system with a WUSB over an IEEE 802.15.6 wireless body area network (WBAN) for wireless wearable computer systems. Due to the portable and wearable nature of wearable computer systems, the WUSB over IEEE 802.15.6 hierarchical medium access control (MAC) protocol has to support power saving operations and integrate WUSB transactions with WBAN traffic efficiently. In this paper, we propose a low-power hibernation technique (LHT) for WUSB over IEEE 802.15.6 hierarchical MAC to improve its energy efficiency. Simulation results show that the LHT also integrates WUSB transactions and WBAN traffic efficiently while it achieves high energy efficiency.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.35 no.9B
• /
• pp.1305-1313
• /
• 2010

Last few years, wireless personal area network (WPAN) has been widely researched for various healthcare applications. Due to restriction of device hardware (e.g., energy and memory), we need to design a highly-versatile MAC layer protocol for WBAN (Wireless Body Area Network). In addition, when an emergency occurs to a patient, a priority mechanism is necessitated for a urgent message to get through to the final destination. This paper presents a priority mechanism referred to as hybrid priority MAC for WBAN. Through extensive simulation, we show the proposed MAC protocol can minimize the average packet latency for urgent data. Thus, when patients have an emergency situation, our MAC allows adequate assistance time and medical treatment for patients. The simulation based on NS-2 shows that our Hybrid Priority MAC has the good performance and usability.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.7 no.5
• /
• pp.1108-1130
• /
• 2013

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are becoming increasingly important to solve the issue of health care. IEEE 802.15.6 is a wireless communication standard for WBANs, aiming to provide a real-time and continuous monitoring. In this paper, we present our development of a modified Markov Chain model and a backoff model, in which most features such as user priorities, contention windows, modulation and coding schemes (MCSs), and frozen states are taken into account. Then we calculate the normalized throughput and average access delay of IEEE 802.15.6 networks under saturation and ideal channel conditions. We make an evaluation of network performances by comparing with IEEE 802.15.4 and the results validate that IEEE 802.15.6 networks can provide high quality of service (QoS) for nodes with high priorities.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.8 no.12
• /
• pp.4643-4660
• /
• 2014

Integrity authentication of biometric data in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a critical issue because the sensitive data transmitted over broadcast wireless channels could be attacked easily. However, traditional cryptograph-based integrity authentication schemes are not suitable for WBAN as they consume much computational resource on the sensor nodes with limited memory, computational capability and power. To address this problem, a novel lightweight integrity authentication scheme based on reversible watermark is proposed for WBAN and implemented on a TinyOS-based WBAN test bed in this paper. In the proposed scheme, the data is divided into groups with a fixed size to improve grouping efficiency; the histogram shifting technique is adopted to avoid possible underflow or overflow; local maps are generated to restore the shifted data; and the watermarks are generated and embedded in a chaining way for integrity authentication. Our analytic and experimental results demonstrate that the integrity of biometric data can be reliably authenticated with low cost, and the data can be entirely recovered for healthcare applications by using our proposed scheme.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.7 no.5
• /
• pp.967-979
• /
• 2013

Now a day, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are being widely used in different areas one of which is healthcare services. A wireless medical sensor network senses patient's vital physiological signs through medical sensor-nodes deployed on patient's body area; and transmits these signals to devices of registered medical professionals. These sensor-nodes have low computational power and limited storage capacity. Moreover, the wireless nature of technology attracts malicious minds. Thus, proper user authentication is a prime concern before granting access to patient's sensitive and private data. Recently, P. Kumar et al. claimed to propose a strong authentication protocol for healthcare using Wireless Medical Sensor Networks (WMSN). However, we find that P. Kumar et al.'s scheme is flawed with a number of security pitfalls. Information stored inside smart card, if extracted, is enough to deceive a valid user. Adversary can not only access patient's physiological data on behalf of a valid user without knowing actual password, can also send fake/irrelevant information about patient by playing role of medical sensor-node. Besides, adversary can guess a user's password and is able to compute the session key shared between user and medical sensor-nodes. Thus, the scheme looses message confidentiality. Additionally, the scheme fails to resist insider attack and lacks user anonymity.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
• /
• 2008.10a
• /
• pp.365-368
• /
• 2008

This paper presents a new concept of IP-based wireless sensor networks and also introduces a routing protocol that is based on clustering for global healthcare information system. Low-power wireless personal area networks (LoWPANs) conform the standard by IEEE 802.15.4-2003 to IPv6 that makes 6lowpan. It characterized by low bit rate, low power, and low cost as well as protocol for wireless connections. The 6lowpan node with biomedical sensor devices fixed on the patient body area network that should be connected to the gateway in personal area network. Each 6lowpan nodes have IP-addresses that would be directly connected to the internet. With the help of IP-address service provider can recognize or analysis patient biomedical data from anywhere on globe by internet service provider equipments such as cell phone, PDA, note book. The system has been evaluated by technical verification, clinical test, user survey and current status of patient. We used NS-2.33 simulator for our prototype and also simulate the routing protocols. The result shows the performance of biomedical data packets in multi-hope routing as well as represents the topology of the networks.