Special issue on "Towards the connected body: advances in body communications"

Abstract

Body area networks (BANs) are quickly becoming a key technology for wireless communications. They consist of body-worn or implanted sensors that wirelessly communicate, leading either to inor on-body communications between sensors, or to off-body communications with devices located in the close vicinity. BAN’s potential applications include, among others, m-health information systems collecting vital parameters in real-time, high-speed connections over the body surface for multimedia transfers or human body interactions with its environment for augmented reality devices. Several technologies are currently under development in order to enable these communications, either narrowband (including RFID technologies), or ultra-wideband (IR-UWB). The latter could be advantageously coupled with positioning algorithms for simultaneous body motion capture. However, in practice, numerous challenges still need to be tackled in order to make BANs viable. The sensor’s autonomy, size, and cost are critical parameters which can only be optimized by adopting an interdisciplinary approach, where the propagation phenomena, the coding or relaying strategies, the MAC protocols, and the network topology are strongly interrelated. The coexistence issue with other networks also seems to be crucial, especially in the hospital environment. This special issue goes through all the layers of telecommunication systems dedicated to body communications, from channel models for onor off-body communications, to global telecare systems based on Bluetooth, smartphones, and GPS. The article “Experimental characterization of an UWB channel for body area networks” by P. Chiang et al. presents UWB channel measurement campaigns, for both onand off-body communications. The measured path loss and multipath analysis suggest that a LOS UWB channel is excellent for low-power, high-data-rate transmission, while NLOS and on-body channels need to be reconfigured to operate at a lower data rate due to high path loss. The article “An analytical modeling of polarized timevariant on-body propagation channels with dynamic body scattering” by L. Liu et al. presents an analytical model of the on-body scattering and propagation on the trunk of a walking person. The results act as an example of how analytical models can provide efficient yet precise predictions of time-variant, on-body propagation to understand the mechanisms underlying the propagation characteristics. The article “In-body Path Loss Models for Implants in Heterogeneous Human Tissues using Implantable Slot Dipole Conformal Flexible Antennas” by F. Axisa et al. discusses the path loss of implant communication channel for a 6-year male child with slot dipole conformal antennas at 2.45 GHz via 3D electromagnetic simulations. The article proves that exponential attenuation model is well applicable to the heterogeneous model as well, but homogeneous phantom may underestimate the pathloss compared with more realistic heterogeneous phantom. The article “Secure Precise Clock Synchronization for Interconnected Body Area Networks” by D. Sanchez et al. tackles secure time synchronization in BANs. A combination of secure pairwise synchronization, rate adaptive time synchronization, and μTESLA is used to achieve energy efficient, accurate, and secure synchronization between BAN nodes. In “Emergency Handling for MAC protocol in Human Body Communication (HBC-MAC)” by O. Buyanjargal et al., a specific emergency handling operation is proposed for BAN’s MAC protocol in order to meet the emergency requirements for BAN without wasteful dedicated slots for emergency in each superframe. The article “Impact of the Environment and the Topology on the Performance of Hierarchical Body Area Networks” by J.-M. Dricot et al. addresses the throughput and energy consumption of various BAN topologies * Correspondence: pdedonck@ulb.ac.be Universite libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium Full list of author information is available at the end of the article De Doncker et al. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 2011, 2011:203 http://jwcn.eurasipjournals.com/content/2011/1/203