Challenges In Wireless Body Area Network Research Articles

Prediction-based channel assignment for minimizing channel switching in mobile WBANs

As the world’s population rises, the healthcare system experiences significant changes. Wireless body area network (WBAN) is an emerging technology that has considerable impact on medical and non-medical applications. However, two crucial challenges in WBANs are interference minimization and channel assignment. High interference may increase collision probability, transmission delay, and energy consumption. Multichannel schemes are proposed to reduce the data transmission latency and improve the system throughput by allowing simultaneous transmission of sensors in coexisting WBANs. When WBAN users move, they need to switch the channels frequently to avoid potential channel conflicts and to maintain the Quality of Service (QoS). However, frequent switching may raise energy consumption and aggravate delay. Existing multichannel assignment schemes failed to perform well in highly dynamic and densely deployed WBANs environments. In contrast to existing studies, this paper proposes a Prediction-based Channel Assignment (PCA) algorithm that selects the channels for WBANs to remain valid for future time instances and thus minimizes the delay and number of channel switches for dynamic and coexisting WBANs. When a WBAN needs to switch a channel, the proposed method predicts the future neighbors of that WBAN based on its history. It explores the channel information of present and future neighbors to select a suitable channel with higher resilience in a dynamic environment. Thus, our algorithm minimizes channel interference by avoiding unnecessary channel switching. We have used machine learning algorithms to predict the future neighbors of a WBAN. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than an existing algorithm and random channel assignment in delay and throughput.

PEDTARA: Priority-Based Energy Efficient, Delay and Temperature Aware Routing Algorithm Using Multi-Objective Genetic Chaotic Spider Monkey Optimization for Critical Data Transmission in WBANs

Software-Defined Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN)s have gained significance in emergency healthcare applications for remote patients. Prioritization of healthcare data traffic has a high influence on the congestion and delay in the WBAN routing process. Currently, the energy constraints, packet loss, retransmission delay and increased sensor heat are pivotal research challenges in WBAN. These challenges also degrade the network lifetime and create serious issues for critical health data transmission. In this context, a Priority-based Energy-efficient, Delay and Temperature Aware Routing Algorithm (PEDTARA) is presented in this paper using a hybrid optimization algorithm of Multi-objective Genetic Chaotic Spider Monkey Optimization (MGCSMO). This proposed optimized routing algorithm is designed by incorporating the benefits of chaotic and genetic operators to the position updating function of enhanced Spider Monkey Optimization. For the prioritized routing process, initially, the patient data transmission in the WBAN is categorized into normal, on-demand and emergency data transmissions. Each category is ensured with efficient routing using the three different strategies of the suggested PEDTARA. PEDTARA performs optimal shortest path routing for normal data, energy-efficient emergency routing for high priority critical data and faster but priority verified routing for on-demand data. Thus, the proposed PEDTARA ensures energy-efficient, congestion-controlled and delay and temperature aware routing at any given period of health monitoring. Experiments were performed over a high-performance simulation scenario and the evaluation results showed that the proposed PEDTARA performs efficient routing better than the traditional approaches in terms of energy, temperature, delay, congestion and network lifetime.

Wireless technologies, medical applications and future challenges in WBAN: a survey

Interest and need for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have significantly increased recently. WBAN consists of miniaturized sensors designed to collect and transmit data through wireless network, enabling medical specialists to monitor patients during their normal daily life and providing real time opinions for medical diagnosis. Many wireless technologies have proved themselves in WBAN applications, while others are still under investigations. The choice of the technology to adopt may depend on the disease to monitor and the performance requirements, i.e. reliability, latency and data rate. In addition, the suitable sensor is essential when seeking to extract the data related to a medical measure. This paper aims at surveying the wireless technologies used in WBAN systems. In addition to a detailed survey on the existing technologies, the use of the emerging Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies, and the future 5G, B5G and 6G is investigated, where the suitability of these technologies to WBAN applications is studied from several perspectives. Furthermore, medical applications of WBAN are discussed by presenting their methodologies, the adopted wireless technologies and the used sensors. Given that each medical application requires the appropriate sensor to extract the data, we highlight a wide range of the sensors used in the market for medical systems. Recent and future challenges in WBAN systems are given related to the power consumption, the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in WBAN and others.

An enhanced scalable and secure RFID authentication protocol for WBAN within an IoT environment

Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT)-based E-healthcare represents an emergent research field due to the fast development of wireless technologies and cloud computing. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an integral technology in IoT thanks to its low cost and autonomous data collection and transfer. These features made it useful in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) for healthcare applications. However, data security and patient privacy remain major challenges in WBANs. In this context, many authentication protocols have been designed trying to satisfy both security and implementation requirements. Most recently, Naeem et al. have proposed an RFID authentication scheme for IoT which is claimed to be secure and provides scalability. Unfortunately, we have found that their protocol does not provide authentication and anonymity and it is vulnerable to numerous attacks. To overcome these security issues, we propose, in this paper, an efficient extended and improved IoT-based RFID authentication scheme for WBANs. Our proposed protocol could resist to various attacks and ensure mutual authentication from the tag to the medical server, in addition to patients data security. For this, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) encryption mechanism and elliptic curve digital signature with message recovery (ECDSMR) have been adopted. Formal and informal analysis have proved that our proposed protocol succeeded to provide many security features and offer reliable data security with a considerably small computational and storage cost compared to existing schemes.

A Review on Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Body Area Networks for Healthcare Applications

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a new trend in the technology that provides remote mechanism to monitor and collect patient’s health record data using wearable sensors. It is widely recognized that a high level of system security and privacy play a key role in protecting these data when being used by the healthcare professionals and during storage to ensure that patient’s records are kept safe from intruder’s danger. It is therefore of great interest to discuss security and privacy issues in WBANs. In this paper, we reviewed WBAN communication architecture, security and privacy requirements and security threats and the primary challenges in WBANs to these systems based on the latest standards and publications. This paper also covers the state-of-art security measures and research in WBAN.

A Review on Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Body Area Networks for Healthcare Applications

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a new trend in the technology that provides remote mechanism to monitor and collect patient’s health record data using wearable sensors. It is widely recognized that a high level of system security and privacy play a key role in protecting these data when being used by the healthcare professionals and during storage to ensure that patient’s records are kept safe from intruder’s danger. It is therefore of great interest to discuss security and privacy issues in WBANs. In this paper, we reviewed WBAN communication architecture, security and privacy requirements and security threats and the primary challenges in WBANs to these systems based on the latest standards and publications. This paper also covers the state-of-art security measures and research in WBAN.

Challenges in Wireless Body Area Network

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) refers to a short-range, wireless communications in the vicinity of, or inside a human body. WBAN is emerging solution to cater the needs of local and remote health care related facility. Medical and non-medical applications have been revolutionarily under consideration for providing a healthy and gratify service to humanity. Being very critical in communication of the data from body, it faces many challenges, which are to be tackled for the safety of life and benefit of the user. There is variety of challenges faced by WBAN. WBAN is favorite playground for attackers due to its usability in various applications. This article provides systematic overview of challenges in WBAN in communication and security perspectives.

Routing Optimization in WBAN using Bees Algorithm for Overcrowded Hajj Environment

Crowded places like Hajj environment in Makkah which host from 2 to 3 million on specific area and time can pose health challenges for pilgrims who need medical care. One of the solutions to overcome such difficulties is to use Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). WBAN is one of the new technology using wireless sensor network to gather data about status of patient then to forward collected data to be proceeded. However, various types of challenges in WBAN should be concerned. Power consumption is critical within WBAN system. Furthermore, delay of data transfer may lead to wrong diagnosis or uncorrected report that may lead to death; therefore, the transferred data must be reliable to ensure accuracy in measurement. In this paper, we propose a framework for routing optimization in medical wireless network. The proposed framework optimize shortest path in different stages of collected data to get less energy consumption, and reduce transmission time. The proposed work is based on Bees Algorithm to overcome such challenges and find shortest path for data within shortest time during overcrowded of Hajj environment. Matlab simulation results show good performance of Bees Algorithm in terms of reducing transmission time, energy consumption, delay, and throughput.

Survey on Efficient Certificateless Access Control for Wireless Body Area Networks

Recent developments and advances in the field of wireless communication has led to the discovery of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). The wearable computing devices made it easy to monitor the health issues of patients. The WBANs are widely used taking into account its numerous advantages. Many publications are available mentioning the various challenges of WBANs. In this paper, a survey is performed on the current state-of-art of WBANs based on the latest standards and publications. Open issues and challenges within each area are also explored as a source of inspiration towards future developments in WBANs

A Review of State-of-the-Art on Wireless Body Area Networks

During the last few years, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have emerged into many application domains, such as medicine, sport, entertainments, military, and monitoring. This emerging networking technology can be used for e-health monitoring. In this paper, we review the literature and investigate the challenges in the development architecture of WBANs. Then, we classified the challenges of WBANs that need to be addressed for their development. Moreover, we investigate the various diseases and healthcare systems and current state-of-the-art of applications and mainly focus on the remote monitoring for elderly and chronically diseases patients. Finally, relevant research issues and future development are discussed.

A Cooperative Transmission Strategy for Body-Area Networks in Healthcare Systems

Wireless body area networks (BANs) have attracted enormous attention due to the promising applications in healthcare systems. Energy saving is one of the major challenges in wireless BANs, because the sensors operating on or inside a human body are energy limited. As the applying cooperative communications offers energy saving, it is necessary to utilize the sensor devices jointly in BANs to form cooperative communication. In this paper, the energy consumption models of cooperative transmission strategies are built over in- and on-body wireless communication links for direct and relay transmission scenarios. In relay cooperative strategy, the implantable and wearable devices work together by using a cooperative multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technique. In direct cooperative strategy, two wearable devices operate as the cooperative MIMO. In these ways, the energy savings of both direct and relay transmissions are achieved during the data transmission in BANs. Moreover, the closed-form expression of end-to-end average bit error ratio (BER) is derived toward minimizing the required transmission power for relay transmission scenario. In the results, it is demonstrated that the significant energy savings of the proposed cooperative transmission strategies can be obtained compared with the existing approaches under the same conditions.

U-Healthcare System: State-of-the-Art Review and Challenges

With the increase of an ageing population and chronic diseases, society becomes more health conscious and patients become "health consumers" looking for better health management. People's perception is shifting towards patient-centered, rather than the classical, hospital-centered health services which has been propelling the evolution of telemedicine research from the classic e-Health to m-Health and now is to ubiquitous healthcare (u-Health). It is expected that mobile & ubiquitous Telemedicine, integrated with Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), have a great potential in fostering the provision of next-generation u-Health. Despite the recent efforts and achievements, current u-Health proposed solutions still suffer from shortcomings hampering their adoption today. This paper presents a comprehensive review of up-to-date requirements in hardware, communication, and computing for next-generation u-Health systems. It compares new technological and technical trends and discusses how they address expected u-Health requirements. A thorough survey on various worldwide recent system implementations is presented in an attempt to identify shortcomings in state-of-the art solutions. In particular, challenges in WBAN and ubiquitous computing were emphasized. The purpose of this survey is not only to help beginners with a holistic approach toward understanding u-Health systems but also present to researchers new technological trends and design challenges they have to cope with, while designing such systems.