Wireless Body Area Network Communication Research Articles

A survey overview: on wireless body area network and its various applications

With the remarkable change of mobile radio communication over the past years in the wireless communication technologies, makes the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) services to be adopted by most of the people around the world. Wireless body area network is such a special purpose sensor network that was made for continues monitoring the health parameters in real time with the different wire-less sensors by implanting internally or externally of a human body. This wireless sensed information from the vital organs of the human body may be in the form of data, voice, video signals are communicated wirelessly through WBAN. This survey article presents an overview on- the WBAN communication architecture, comparison of WBAN and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), WBAN operating protocols- those are intended for short range wireless communication, and its applications in the medical and non- medical field have been out lined.

A power-aware 2-covered path routing for wireless body area networks with variable transmission ranges

Wireless body area networks (WBAN) are an emerging form of technology which provides a base for various implantable and wearable sensors. This paper presents a 2-covered path routing that provides each WBAN along a path sheltered from an intersectional coverage of at least two WBAN hubs to provide high availability and reliable multi-hop communication in WBANs. In radio frequency (RF) systems, the power consumption required to transmit data grows at least quadratic times as its transmission range. Therefore, this paper studies the 2-covered path problem in which antennas have discrete transmission power levels. Given a set of n antennas with m available radii, a source and a sink on the plane, we propose three power-aware methods to construct 2-covered paths between source and sink. The proposed methods are graph transformation planning (GTP), 2-covered area stretching planning (TASP) and radii shrinking planning (RSP) which apply different strategies to reduce overall power consumption of the network. Experiments show that GTP obtains the maximum power saving while RSP and TASP are polynomial-time algorithms and save power up to 96% of those achieved by GTP.

ASRQ: Automatic Segment Repeat Request for IEEE 802.15.4-Based WBAN

In a wireless body area network (WBAN), high data reliability and long operating time are important requirements. The retransmission process of the default Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) mechanism in IEEE 802.15.4 is a suitable method to ensure the data reliability of WBAN communications, where frame loss can occur frequently. However, retransmitting the entire DATA frame is energy inefficient due to the fact that the most of payload data within lost frames are only partially corrupted. Therefore, this paper proposes the automatic segment repeat request scheme for the IEEE 802.15.4-based WBANs. The proposed scheme partitions the data payload into segments when the channel condition is bad, and retransmits only the corrupted segment(s). This reduces the size of the retransmitted frames, which improves frame reception rate and decreases the amount of transmitted traffic, and thus energy consumption. Our experiments using a real IEEE 802.15.4-based WBAN test bed show that the proposed method provides higher transmission reliability and lower power consumption than the default IEEE 802.15.4 ARQ mechanism.

A Survey on Secure Wireless Body Area Networks

Combining tiny sensors and wireless communication technology, wireless body area network (WBAN) is one of the most promising fields. Wearable and implantable sensors are utilized for collecting the physiological data to achieve continuously monitoring of people’s physical conditions. However, due to the openness of wireless environment and the significance and privacy of people’s physiological data, WBAN is vulnerable to various attacks; thus, strict security mechanisms are required to enable a secure WBAN. In this article, we mainly focus on a survey on the security issues in WBAN, including securing internal communication in WBAN and securing communication between WBAN and external users. For each part, we discuss and identify the security goals to be achieved. Meanwhile, relevant security solutions in existing research on WBAN are presented and their applicability is analyzed.

Equalized Energy Consumption in Wireless Body Area Networks for a Prolonged Network Lifetime

The phenomenal advances in electronics contributed to a widespread use of distributed sensors in wireless communications. A set of biosensors can be deployed or implanted in the human body to form a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), where various WBAN PHY layers are utilized. The WBAN allows the measurement of physiological data, which is forwarded by the gateway to the base station for analysis purposes. The main issue in conceiving a WBAN communication mechanism is to manage the residual energy of sensors. The mobile agent system has been widely applied for surveillance applications in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). It consists in dispatching one or more mobile agents simultaneously to collect data, while following a predetermined optimum itinerary. The continuous use of the optimal itinerary leads to a rapid depletion of sensor nodes batteries, which minimizes the network lifetime. This paper presents a new algorithm to equalize the energy consumption among sensor motes. The algorithm exploits all the available paths towards the destination and classifies them with respect to the end-to-end delay and the overall energy consumption. The proposed algorithm performs better compared to the optimal routing path. It increases the network lifetime to the maximum by postponing routing of data via the most-recently used path, and it also maintains data delivery within the delay interval threshold.

Design of a Tri-Band Off-Body Antenna for WBAN Communication

In this letter, a new tri-band antenna is designed for a wireless body area network (WBAN) device. The proposed antenna consists of two new landolt ring-shaped strips connected by a rectangular strip and symmetrical stubs extended from the coplanar waveguide (CPW) ground plane. By integrating these techniques, an antenna with three operating bands, covering 3.19–4.57, 5.37–5.6, and 7.56–10.67 GHz, is obtained. The proposed antenna is optimized to satisfy the required band with good radiation patterns. The characteristics of the proposed antenna in on-body environment are also analyzed. In this scenario, a tri-band antenna for VSWR $ \leq $ 2 is also achieved successfully. The fabricated antenna has a compact size of $35 \times 26.6 \times 1.6\, \text{mm}^{3}$ . These features demonstrate that the proposed antenna is a suitable candidate for WBAN applications.

An Improved Protocol for the Password Authenticated Association of IEEE 802.15.6 Standard That Alleviates Computational Burden on the Node

The IEEE Std 802.15.6 is an international standard for wireless body area networks (WBANs). It contains many aspects of communications, and also provides security services, since some communications in WBANs can carry sensitive information. In this standard, the password authenticated association is a protocol for two participants to identify each other and establish a new master key based on a pre-shared short password. However, recent research shows that this protocol is vulnerable to several attacks. In this paper, we propose an improved protocol which can resist all of these attacks. Moreover, the improved protocol alleviates computational burden on one side of the two participants, the node, which is usually less powerful compared with the other side, the hub.

Markov Chain Based QoS Support for Wireless Body Area Network Communication in Health Monitoring Services

Markov Chain Based QoS Support for Wireless Body Area Network Communication in Health Monitoring Services

PPM-HDA: Privacy-Preserving and Multifunctional Health Data Aggregation With Fault Tolerance

Wireless body area networks (WBANs), as a promising health-care system, can provide tremendous benefits for timely and continuous patient care and remote health monitoring. Owing to the restriction of communication, computation and power in WBANs, cloud-assisted WBANs, which offer more reliable, intelligent, and timely health-care services for mobile users and patients, are receiving increasing attention. However, how to aggregate the health data multifunctionally and efficiently is still an open issue to the cloud server (CS). In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving and multifunctional health data aggregation (PPM-HDA) mechanism with fault tolerance for cloud-assisted WBANs. With PPM-HDA, the CS can compute multiple statistical functions of users’ health data in a privacy-preserving way to offer various services. In particular, we first propose a multifunctional health data additive aggregation scheme (MHDA+) to support additive aggregate functions, such as average and variance. Then, we put forward MHDA $^{\oplus }$ as an extension of MHDA+ to support nonadditive aggregations, such as min/max, median, percentile, and histogram. The PPM-HDA can resist differential attacks, which most existing data aggregation schemes suffer from. The security analysis shows that the PPM-HDA can protect users’ privacy against many threats. Performance evaluations illustrate that the computational overhead of MHDA+ is significantly reduced with the assistance of CSs. Our MHDA $^{\oplus }$ scheme is more efficient than previously reported min/max aggregation schemes in terms of communication overhead when the applications require large plaintext space and highly accurate data.

Wearable antenna with tripolarisation diversity for WBAN communications

A wearable antenna with tripolarisation diversity is designed for wireless body area networks (WBANs). The antenna is fabricated with flexible materials. Three polarisations are realised by combining an inductive loaded circular monopolar patch antenna with a microstrip annular ring antenna. Simulated and measured results show that the antenna has sufficient bandwidth for a WBAN. The port isolation reaches 13.5 dB, and the correlation coefficients show a good diversity performance.

Comprehensive Performance Analysis of Fully Cooperative Communication in WBANs

While relay-based cooperative networks (widely known in the literature as cooperative communication), where relays only forward signals from the sources to the destination, have been extensively researched, fully cooperative systems have not been thoroughly examined. Unlike relay networks, in a fully cooperative network, each node acts as both a source node sending its own data and a relay forwarding its partner’s data to the destination. Mutual cooperation between neighboring nodes is believed to improve the overall system error performance, especially when space-time codes are incorporated. However, a comprehensive performance analysis of space-time-coded fully cooperative communication from all three perspectives, namel,y error performance, outage probability, and energy efficiency, is still missing. Answers to the commonly asked questions of whether, in what conditions, and to what extent the space-time-coded fully cooperative communication is better than direct transmission are still unknown. Motivated by this fact and inspired by the increasing popularity of healthcare applications in wireless body area networks (WBANs), this paper derives for the first time a comprehensive performance analysis of a decode-and-forward space-time coded fully cooperative communication network in Rayleigh and Rician fading channels in either identically or non-identically distributed fading scenario. Numerical analysis of error performance, outage probability, and energy efficiency, validated by simulations, show that fully cooperative communication is better than direct transmission from all three aspects in many cases, especially at a low-power and low signal-to-noise ratio regime, which is a typical working condition in WBANs.

New Authentication Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks Using the Bilinear Pairing

Due to the development of information technologies and network technologies, healthcare systems have been employed in many countries. As an important part of healthcare systems, the wireless body area network (WBAN) could bring convenience to both patients and physicians because it could help physicians to monitor patients' physiological values remotely. It is essential to ensure secure communication in WBANs because patients' physiological values are very sensitive. Recently, Liu et al. proposed an efficient authentication scheme for WBANs. Unfortunately, Zhao pointed out that their schemesuffered from the stolen verifier-table attack. To improve security and efficiency, Zhao proposed an anonymous authentication scheme for WBANs. However, Zhao's scheme cannot provide real anonymity because the users' pseudo identities are constant value and the attack could tract the users. In this paper, we propose a new anonymous authentication scheme for WBANs. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme could overcome weaknesses in previous scheme. We also use the BAN logic to demonstrate the security of the proposed scheme.

Energy-efficient Cluster-based Mechanism for WBAN Communications for Healthcare Applications

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are formed with the help of tiny health monitoring sensors on the human body in order to collect and communicate the human personal data. WBANs provides a solution to facilitate the tasks performed in the medical sector, and minimize the chances of errors during the process of medical diagnosis. However, using an expensive key management method is not feasible in highly resource-constrained WBANs. Therefore, we propose and evaluate an energy-efficient key management scheme for WBANs that takes into account available resources of a node during the whole life cycle of key management. Our proposed scheme is a cluster-based hybrid security energy efficient framework. By using multiple clusters, energy-efficiency can be ensured. The performance comparison of our proposed cluster-based key management scheme and low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH)-based key agreement scheme and energy – efficient mechanism shows that the proposed scheme is more energy-efficient, and provides better network lifetime. General Terms Medium access layer (MAC), low-rate (LR) , PHY, Radio Frequency (RF),DLL

Joint optimal relay location and power allocation for ultra-wideband-based wireless body area networks

In this paper, we study the joint optimal relay location and power allocation problem for single-relay-assisted ultra-wideband (UWB)-based wireless body area networks (WBANs). Specifically, to optimize spectral efficiency (SE) for single-relay cooperative communication in UWB-based WBANs, we seek the relay with the optimal location together with the corresponding optimal power allocation. With proposed relay-location-based network models, the SE maximization problems are mathematically formulated by considering three practical scenarios, namely, along-torso scenario, around-torso scenario, and in-body scenario. Taking into account realistic power considerations for each scenario, the optimal relay location and power allocation are jointly derived and analyzed. Numerical results show the necessity of utilization of relay node for the spectral and energy-efficient transmission in UWB-based WBANs and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in particular for the around-torso and in-body scenarios. With the joint optimal relay location and power allocation, the proposed scheme is able to prolong the network lifetime and extend the transmission range in WBANs significantly compared to direct transmission.

Random room mobility model and extra‐wireless body area network communication in hospital buildings

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) can help in enabling efficient patient monitoring solution for ubiquitous healthcare. Communication in WBANs is undertaken in two phases: intra-WBAN and extra-WBAN . The prevailing WBANs use cellular network or WiFi in the extra-WBAN phase involving communication between the on-body coordinator and access points (APs) connected to the medical server through the internet. The medical applications of the WBANs have stringent requirements of low end-to-end delay and high packet delivery ratio. The authors evaluate the performance of extra-WBAN communication in the network of WBANs which is deployed within a building environment. They proposed a mobility model named random room mobility ( RRM ), which is used to capture the dynamics of WBAN user mobility within the building. They studied the performance of extra-WBAN communication using the proposed mobility model and a random waypoint mobility model. The metrics used in evaluating the performance are packet drop ratio, average node-to-AP delay and average residual energy per node. The authors show that with an increase in the number of WBANs, the traffic generation rate and the payload size have high impact on the packet loss in the network. They studied the performance of extra-WBAN communication using the priority mode available in IEEE 802.11 for provisioning quality-of-service (QoS). We show that it is suitable for medical applications, when the size of network consisting of WBANs, including the QoS-enabled WBANs, is small.

WBAN data scheduling and aggregation under WBAN/WLAN healthcare network

Nowadays, wireless body area networks (WBANs) become an emerging technology which has grown considerably. An increase in the deployment of devices on patients promotes researchers and application developers to focus on issues related to WBAN networks. Therefore, several studies have been done in this field by researchers. The IEEE 802.15.6 standard was proposed to satisfy all the requirements for WBANs communication. As sensed data in such type of networks, it should be transmitted in a reliable and QoS based way. A public-BAN is defined as a network of several personal-BANs. The centralized public-BAN consists of a static coordinator and several personal-BANs. The static coordinator is able to command a portable coordinator in order to control a personal-BAN and runs as an Internet Gateway. In this paper, we considered bridging communications between the IEEE 802.15.6-based WBANs and the IEEE 802.11e-based centralized public-BAN (WLAN). Especially, we proposed two new scheduling algorithms to satisfy QoS requirements in WBAN networks and to overcome the starvation mode of the packets without the highest priority. In order to perform this aim, we introduced the critical delay (CD) as a parameter to serve packets taking into account their priorities and classify them into an aggregated frame. The performance of our proposed schedulers is compared with Priority Queue scheduler (PQ) and Priority Queue Aggregation scheduler (PQA). Conducted simulations illustrate that our proposed schedulers performance overcomes the other schedulers in term of latency, throughput and dropped packets for emergency, general monitoring and controlled load traffics.

A broadcast-based key agreement scheme using set reconciliation for wireless body area networks.

Information and communication technologies have thrived over the last few years. Healthcare systems have also benefited from this progression. A wireless body area network (WBAN) consists of small, low-power sensors used to monitor human physiological values remotely, which enables physicians to remotely monitor the health of patients. Communication security in WBANs is essential because it involves human physiological data. Key agreement and authentication are the primary issues in the security of WBANs. To agree upon a common key, the nodes exchange information with each other using wireless communication. This information exchange process must be secure enough or the information exchange should be minimized to a certain level so that if information leak occurs, it does not affect the overall system. Most of the existing solutions for this problem exchange too much information for the sake of key agreement; getting this information is sufficient for an attacker to reproduce the key. Set reconciliation is a technique used to reconcile two similar sets held by two different hosts with minimal communication complexity. This paper presents a broadcast-based key agreement scheme using set reconciliation for secure communication in WBANs. The proposed scheme allows the neighboring nodes to agree upon a common key with the personal server (PS), generated from the electrocardiogram (EKG) feature set of the host body. Minimal information is exchanged in a broadcast manner, and even if every node is missing a different subset, by reconciling these feature sets, the whole network will still agree upon a single common key. Because of the limited information exchange, if an attacker gets the information in any way, he/she will not be able to reproduce the key. The proposed scheme mitigates replay, selective forwarding, and denial of service attacks using a challenge-response authentication mechanism. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme has a great deal of adoptability in terms of security, communication overhead, and running time complexity, as compared to the existing EKG-based key agreement scheme.

UWB All-Textile Antenna With Full Ground Plane for Off-Body WBAN Communications

A fully textile microstrip topology with ultra wideband (UWB) characteristics useful in wireless body area networks (WBAN) is proposed. The antenna is operable within the full UWB band and incorporates a full textile shielding ground plane. The full ground plane is shown to be crucial in maintaining the performance when worn on-body. It successfully reduces any on-body performance degradation, resulting in a very robust structure. A detailed numerical and experimental evaluation of the antenna is performed in free space and on body.

Multi-Channel Framework for Body Area Network in Health Monitoring

Increasing use of wireless networks has empowered the facility of ubiquitous health monitoring especially in advanced countries. Various small devices are attached to human body forming personalized wireless body area network (WBAN). These small devices interact with each other using different radios and antennas sc hemes proposed by many researchers around the globe. However, most of these schemes are facing problem of inefficiency due to fading and shadowing effects. We propose a novel multi-radio multi- channel framework for efficient communication among devices in WBAN. The focus of this research is to ensure energy efficient and reliable communication in WBAN.

Frequency and pattern reconfigurable dipole-Yagi antenna

A novel dipole-Yagi antenna is presented with pattern and frequency reconfigurable capability. The novel structure is based from Yagi-Uda antenna, consist of dipole as a main radiator and four parasitic metal strips. The parasitic metal strips can be formed to function as part of the radiator, reflector, or director by means of switches. The switches are located at specific position. By bridging the main radiator to the metal strips, frequency reconfiguration can be achieved. Whilst by bridging the strips itself, will results in pattern changing. Three switchable patterns at 2.5 GHz and four switched band at 0.98, 1.5, 2.1, and 2.5 GHz are demonstrated. This antenna exhibits −10 dB return loss and 76–79% efficiency. Good agreement between measured and simulated results is observed. The antenna might be useful for wireless body area networks communication system. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 55:447–450, 2012; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.27323