• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제7권5호
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• pp.980-997
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• 2013

Nowadays, wireless communication has a great advantage in technology. We use wireless devices almost in all expected life such as: entertainment, working and recently in the healthcare area, where Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) become a hot topic for researchers and system designers. Recent work on WBANs focus on related issues to communication protocol, especially ZigBee network is fine tuned to meet particular requirements in healthcare area. For example, some papers present real-time patient monitoring via ZigBee communication given the short distance between body sensors and remote devices, while the other work solve the limited coverage problem of Zigbee by designing mechanisms to relay Zigbee data to other types of wire or wireless infrastructure. However, very few of them investigate the scenarios of ZigBee coexisting or integrated with other networks. In this paper, we present the real-time data transmission from ZigBee end devices to Wide Area Network (WAN), Worldwide interoperation for microwave access network (WiMAX) and Long Term Evolution network (LTE). We provide in detail the ZigBee gateway components. Our simulation is conducted by OPNET, we visualize many topology network scenarios in ZigBee hybrid system. The results in simulation show that ZigBee end devices can successfully transmit data in real-time to other network end devices.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• 제17권4호
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• pp.419-427
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• 2015

There have been increases in the elderly population worldwide, and this has been accompanied by rapid growth in the health-care market, as there is an ongoing need to monitor the health of individuals. Wireless body area networks (WBANs) consist of wireless sensors attached on or inside the human body to monitor vital health-related problems, e.g., electrocardiograms (ECGs), electroencephalograms (EEGs), and electronystagmograms (ENGs). With WBANs, patients' vital signs are recorded by each sensor and sent to a coordinator. However, because of obstructions by the human body, sensors cannot always send the data to the coordinator, requiring them to transmit at higher power. Therefore, we need to consider the lifetime of the sensors given their required transmit power. In the IEEE 802.15.6 standard, the transmission topology functions as a one-hop star plus one topology. In order to obtain a high throughput, we reduce the transmit power of the sensors and maintain equity for all sensors. We propose the multiple-hop transmission for WBANs based on the IEEE 802.15.6 carrier-sense multiple-access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol. We calculate the throughput and variance of the transmit power by performing simulations, and we discuss the results obtained using the proposed theorems.

• ETRI Journal
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• 제41권4호
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• pp.452-464
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• 2019

The use of wireless body area networks (WBANs) in healthcare applications has made it convenient to monitor both health personnel and patient status continuously in real time through wearable wireless sensor nodes. However, the heterogeneous and complex network structure of WBANs has some disadvantages in terms of control and management. The software-defined network (SDN) approach is a promising technology that defines a new design and management approach for network communications. In order to create more flexible and dynamic network structures in WBANs, this study uses the SDN approach. For this, a WBAN architecture based on the SDN approach with a new energy-aware routing algorithm for healthcare architecture is proposed. To develop a more flexible architecture, a controller that manages all HUBs is designed. The proposed architecture is modeled using the Riverbed Modeler software for performance analysis. The simulation results show that the SDN-based structure meets the service quality requirements and shows superior performance in terms of energy consumption, throughput, successful transmission rate, and delay parameters according to the traditional routing approach.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제7권8호
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• pp.1805-1824
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• 2013

Recently, the use of wireless body area networks (WBAN) has been increasing rapidly in medical healthcare applications. WBANs consist of smart nodes that can be used to sense and transmit vital data such as heart rate, temperature and ECG from a human body to a medical centre. WBANs depend on limited resources such as energy and bandwidth. In order to utilise these resources efficiently, a very well organized medium access control (MAC) protocol must be considered. In this paper, a new, adaptive and energy-efficient MAC protocol, entitled isMAC, is proposed for WBANs. The proposed MAC is based on multi-channel communication and aims to prolong the network lifetime by effectively employing (i) a collision prevention mechanism, (ii) a coordinator node (WCN) selection algorithm and (iii) a transmission power adjustment approach. The isMAC protocol has been developed and modelled, by using OPNET Modeler simulation software. It is based on a networking scenario that requires especially high data rates such as ECG, for performance evaluation purposes. Packet delay, network throughput and energy consumption have been chosen as performance metrics. The comparison between the simulation results of isMAC and classical IEEE 802.15.4 (ZigBee) protocol shows that isMAC significantly outperforms IEEE 802.15.4 in terms of packet delay, throughput and energy consumption.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• 제13권2호
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• pp.142-148
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• 2011

Because currently available wireless technologies are not appropriate for wireless body area networks (WBANs), the IEEE 802.15.6 standard was introduced by the IEEE 802.15.6 Task Group to satisfy all the requirements for a monitoring system that operates on, in, or around the human body. In this work, we develop an analytical model for evaluating the performance of an IEEE 802.15.6-based WBAN under saturation condition and a noisy channel. We employ a three-dimensional Markov chain to model the backoff procedure as specified in the standard. Probability generating functions (PGFs) are used to compute the performance descriptors of the network. The results obtained from the analytical model are validated by simulation results. Our results indicate that under saturation condition, the medium is accessed by the highest user priority nodes at the vast majority of time while the other nodes are starving.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제10권1호
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• pp.221-237
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• 2016

The wireless body area networks (WBANs) consist of wearable computing devices and can support various healthcare-related applications. There exist two crucial issues when WBANs are utilized for healthcare applications. One is the protection of the sensitive biometric data transmitted over the insecure wireless channels. The other is the design of effective medical management mechanisms. In this paper, a secure medical information management system is proposed and implemented on a TinyOS-based WBAN test bed to simultaneously address these two issues. In this system, the electronic medical record (EMR) is bound to the biometric data with a novel fragile zero-watermarking scheme based on the modified visual secret sharing (MVSS). In this manner, the EMR can be utilized not only for medical management but also for data integrity checking. Additionally, both the biometric data and the EMR are encrypted, and the EMR is further protected by the MVSS. Our analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system not only protects the confidentialities of both the biometric data and the EMR but also offers reliable patient information authentication, explicit healthcare operation verification and undeniable doctor liability identification for WBANs.

• ETRI Journal
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• 제43권1호
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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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제6권9호
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• pp.2302-2322
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• 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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제10권9호
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• pp.4188-4206
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• 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)
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• 제7권5호
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• pp.1108-1130
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• 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.