Wireless Body Area Networks Protocol Research Articles

TSFIS-GWO: Metaheuristic-driven takagi-sugeno fuzzy system for adaptive real-time routing in WBANs

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is an internet-of-things technology that facilitates remote patient monitoring and enables medical staff to administer timely treatments. One of the main challenges in designing WBANs is the routing problem, which is complicated due to dynamic changes in network topology and the limited resources of nodes. Several heuristic and metaheuristic methods have been presented to solve the routing problem in WBANs. Although metaheuristics outperform heuristics by producing higher-quality solutions, they cannot respond to real-time requests. This paper introduces a reactive routing protocol for WBANs that combines a fuzzy heuristic with a metaheuristic learning model. It utilizes a Takagi-Sugeno Fuzzy Inference System in conjunction with the Grey Wolf Optimizer (named TSFIS-GWO). The objective is to simultaneously benefit from the advantages of both approaches, namely, the effectiveness of metaheuristics for offline hyperparameter tuning and the quickness of fuzzy heuristics for real-time routing. At every round, the tuned fuzzy system takes multiple parameters of the current state of the nodes and links to construct the multi-hop routing tree under IEEE 802.15.6. To optimize the performance of the protocol for each WBAN, the fuzzy rules of the TSFIS model are automatically adjusted through a learning method based on GWO. This is done in accordance with the specific requirements of the application, and the tuning process takes place once before the protocol is applied. Simulation results in three applications demonstrate that the proposed TSFIS-GWO model is capable of providing real-time solutions while outperforming the existing methods in terms of application-specific performance measures.

A Review on Dynamic Network Using Flexible Active-Mode Period Scheme for Telemedicine

Challenges associated with transmitter node during the process of intelligent transceiver nodes attempting to be active state after receiving a message outside its time slot schedule which might result in energy depletion through receiver node are the most notable origin of excessive energy consumption in the system. Various methods have been carried out to minimize the overhead cost. In this article, we presented the Dynamic Network using Adaptive Wake-Up Interval Media Access Control (MAC) protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) for telemedicine which could lead to the minimization of the energy consumption in the network and maximization of network lifetime. A Receiver Controlled mechanism balances the number of wake-up periods between Receiver node and Transmitter nodes and estimation of traffic load. This article depicts no earlier examination of dynamic network using Flexible Active-Mode period scheme-based media access control protocol for WBAN. Therefore, this review work could lead to the improvement of dynamic network Flexible Active-Mode –media access control protocols and invigorate a clearer way of finding AWI-Media Access Control protocol problems.

Performance Comparison of Wireless Body Area Network Protocol with Dual Carrier Modulations

Performance Comparison of Wireless Body Area Network Protocol with Dual Carrier Modulations

MDP-Based MAC Protocol for WBANs in Edge-Enabled eHealth Systems

In recent years, eHealth systems based on the Internet of Things (IoT) have attracted considerable attention. The wireless body area network (WBAN) is an essential technology of eHealth systems. A major challenge in WBAN is the design of the medium access control (MAC) protocol, which plays a significant role in avoiding collisions, enhancing the energy efficiency, maximizing the network life, and improving the quality of service (QoS) as well as the quality of experience (QoE). In this study, we apply the mobile edge computing (MEC) network architecture to an eHealth system and design a multi-channel MAC protocol for WBAN based on the Markov decision process (MDP). In this protocol, the channel condition and the reward value are considered. By continuously interacting with the environment, the optimal channel resource allocation strategy is generated. Simulation results indicate that the proposed WBAN MAC protocol can adaptively assign different channels to the sensor nodes for data transmission, thereby reducing the collision rate, decreasing the energy consumption, improving the channel utilization, and enhancing the system throughput and QoE.

Provably Secure and Lightweight Patient Monitoring Protocol for Wireless Body Area Network in IoHT.

As one of the important applications of Internet of Health Things (IoHT) technology in the field of healthcare, wireless body area network (WBAN) has been widely used in medical therapy, and it can not only monitor and record physiological information but also transmit the data collected by sensor devices to the server in time. However, due to the unreliability and vulnerability of wireless network communication, as well as the limited storage and computing resources of sensor nodes in WBAN, a lot of authentication protocols for WBAN have been devised. In 2021, Alzahrani et al. designed an anonymous medical monitoring protocol, which uses lightweight cryptographic primitives for WBAN. However, we find that their protocol is defenseless to off-line identity guessing attacks, known-key attacks, and stolen-verifier attacks and has no perfect forward secrecy. Therefore, a patient monitoring protocol for WBAN in IoHT is proposed. We use security proof under the random oracle model (ROM) and automatic verification tool ProVerif to demonstrate that our protocol is secure. According to comparisons with related protocols, our protocol can achieve both high computational efficiency and security.

A Provably Secure Lightweight Key Agreement Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks in Healthcare System

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a vital application of the Internet of Things (IoT) that plays a significant role in gathering a patient's healthcare information. This collected data helps special professionals like doctors or physicians analyze patients' health status to cure different diseases. However, collecting such information from an insecure channel can be threatening due to the potential security threats. Therefore, it is crucial to secure this sensitive information. This article proposes a secure and lightweight authentication protocol for WBAN. The devised protocol is scalable, secure, and lightweight compared to various relevant competing protocols. The informal security analysis shows that the designed protocol is lightweight, secure, and efficient in resisting various major attacks. The performance analysis demonstrates our protocol's supremacy over various competing protocols in terms of computation and communication costs, inducing efficiency of 20.3% and 12.3%, respectively. Moreover, the practical performance of the designed protocol from the network point of view is measured using the widely recognized NS3 simulation tool.

Remote patient monitoring service for sleeping human postures in a WBAN

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) provide wireless remote patient monitoring services where doctors get patients' health records without physically visiting them. In WBANs, biosensors are placed on the patient's body that sense and transmit physiological data to the paired medical personnel. Such medical setups are appropriate for COVID-19 patient monitoring, where the patient remains isolated for an extended period. Sometimes, human body parts impede the signals transmitted by biosensors to the coordinator and this type of occlusion lasts for a longer duration during sleeping human postures. In such circumstances, an intermediate biosensor forwards the signals of the occluded biosensor node. The forwarding of messages results in quick depletion of energy resources at the intermediate biosensor, affecting the overall WBAN services. To resolve this, first, we propose an adaptive Relay-Node Centric (RNC) relay-based communication protocol for WBANs, which reduces energy used in relaying and improves the stability period of the network. Second, we design a novel simulation model using an existing real-life experimental dataset to simulate a WBAN placed on the sleeping patient's body. We derive a Discrete Markov Chain (DTMC) model from real-life data and use human biomechanisms to simulate biosensors' connectivity status in four human sleeping positions. Lastly, we evaluate the performance of RNC against the existing cost-function-based and Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) based relay selection protocols. Results obtained on the real-life dataset and designed simulation model show that RNC outperforms the existing methods in terms of network stability period and packet success ratio.

A novel routing protocol based on grey wolf optimization and Q learning for wireless body area network

Recently, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) have been developed to advance Internet-of-Things (IoT) that play an essential role in biomedical applications. While deploying these applications practically, there may arise associated issues. Among all the available problems, the primary concern is energy utilization among these resource-limited sensors during data communication. These sensors continuously sense the signal and send messages to other nodes. There is a need to optimize the energy utilization in WBAN. This paper proposes a cluster-based routing protocol for WBAN with the benefits of machine learning to predict energy wastage. A Modified Grey Wolf Optimization with Q-Learning (MGWOQL) is proposed for cluster head selection and updating. The proposed protocol used different objective functions to minimize the energy utilization of clusters by selecting the optimal cluster head (CH). The simulation was performed on the MATLAB platform under different conditions. The result analysis shows its efficiency in terms of energy for WBAN.

An Efficient Certificate-Based Data Integrity Auditing Protocol for Cloud-Assisted WBANs

With the evolution of wireless body area networks (WBANs), wearable equipment will improve the human healthcare service. However, the medical data generated in WBANs increase dramatically with time, and the massive data cause the storage burden. With the help of cloud computing, the cloud service provider (CSP) can assist data owners in storing these data collected by sensors. By keeping their data in the CSP, the data integrity and authenticity is a big concern of data owners. To date, many data integrity auditing protocols have been proposed to address this issue. Most of them rely on traditional public-key mechanism, or identity-based cryptography (IBC), or certificateless cryptography (CLC). However, they suffer from the heavy cost of certificate management, key escrow, or the requirement of a secret channel for each user, respectively. To solve these drawbacks, we propose an efficient certificate-based data integrity auditing protocol for cloud-assisted WBANs. In our protocol, the computation cost in tag generation for a data block is fixed, and is independent of the size of the data block. We prove our protocol is secure in the random oracle model (ROM) and use the Java pairing-based cryptography library (JPBC) to implement the protocol. The experimental results show that our protocol is computationally efficient and practical.

CPAOR: Control Packet Aware On-demand Routing Protocol for WBANs

Background & Objective: The core problem of wireless body area network (WBAN) nodes is their limited energy resource. Thus, an energy-efficient routing protocol is crucial to this type of network. A major drawback of current routing protocols is that they do not consider the monitoring of a large number of patients, which may be problematic in the event of disasters. In addition, most routing algorithms fail to consider balancing energy consumption between nodes. Furthermore, routing overhead (RO) and reduced complexity are required in this type of network. Methods: In this paper, we propose a control packet aware on-demand routing (CPAOR) protocol to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks. The proposed protocol decreases the number of control packets and adds awareness for the transmission of control packets, which can extend the network lifetime. Results and Discussion: We analyze and examine the simulation results of the CPAOR protocol using MATLAB in terms of energy consumption, the energy factor, RO, and changing the number of nodes to more than 60 nodes. The CPAOR protocol demonstrates an improvement of 70.9% compared to the DMQoS, ORACE-Net, and DLQoS protocols in terms of energy consumption. This finding proves that the CPAOR protocol is an efficient routing protocol for WBANs. Conclusion: The CPAOR protocol has been proven to be an effective routing protocol for WBANs.

Improved QoS Aware Routing Protocol (IM-QRP) for WBAN Based Healthcare Monitoring System

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a special purpose wireless sensors network designed to connect various self-autonomous medical sensors and appliances located inside and outside of human body. Interests in human Healthcare Monitoring System (HMS) are based on WBAN due to the increasing aging population and chronically ill patients at home. HMS is expected to reduce healthcare expenses by enabling the continuous monitoring of patient’s health remotely in daily life activities. This research focuses on routing protocols in WBAN. The major problems in routing protocols are maximum energy consumption, path loss ratio, packet delivery ratio and maintaining stable signal to noise ratio. Real time analysis is required in HMS to support the patients through doctors, caregivers and hospital systems. Collected data is relayed by using existing wireless communication schemes towards the access point for further retransmission and processing. In this research, an Improved Quality of Service aware Routing Protocol (IM-QRP) is proposed for WBAN based HMS to remotely monitor the elderly people or chronically ill patients in hospitals and residential environments. The proposed protocol is capable to improve 10% residual energy, 30% reduction in path loss ratio, 10% improvement in packet transmission (link reliability) and 7% improvement in SNR as compared to existing CO-LEEBA and QPRD routing protocols. Convolutional Neural Network is used outside the WBAN environment to analyze the medical health records for healthcare diagnosis and intelligent decision-making.

Internet of Things Based Stable Increased-throughput Multi-hop Protocol for Link Efficiency (IoT-SIMPLE) For Health Monitoring Using Wireless Body Area Networks

Aims: This study aimed to propose a routing protocol for IoT-based WBANs that is reliable, power-efficient, and has a high throughput. Background: A variety of services and applications that use wireless connections such as LTE, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee communication technologies have become popular in daily life as a result of the rapid development of network hardware technology. Remote medical monitoring and care is one such service. Governments have developed new policies in response to the healthcare needs of aging populations. Their goal is to create a comprehensive medical network based on new wireless technologies like sensor networks and cloud computing. Their purpose is to take the medical industry and the Internet of Things (IoT) to the next level of development. Objective: The goal of our proposed study is to improve the network nodes' ability to stay alive for a longer period of time and to maintain stability. A longer stability period contributes to high packet delivery of the node to the sink that enhances the efficiency of the WBAN network. Methods: The Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) Internet of Things (IoT) for healthcare applications has attracted attention from various fields of study in the last few years. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol for IoT-based WBANs that is reliable, power-efficient and has a high throughput. To achieve low energy consumption and a longer network lifetime, we used a multi-hop topology. To choose a parent node or forwarder, we propose a cost function that selects a parent node with the highest residual energy and the shortest distance to sink. The residual energy parameter balances energy consumption among sensor nodes, while the distance parameter ensures packet delivery to the sink. Our key goal is to increase WBAN’s total network by raising cumulative energy usage. The residual energy parameter governs the usage of energy by the sensor nodes, while the distance parameter ensures that the packet is effectively transmitted to the sink. Result: Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed protocol is energy efficient and maximizes network stability for longer periods. Conclusion: Real-time health and activity recognition with wearable sensors is a prerequisite for assistive paradigms. In this paper, we suggest a method for routing data to WBANs. The proposed scheme employs a cost function to determine the best route to the sink. The residual energy of nodes and their distance from the sink is used to calculate the cost function. Nodes with a lower cost function value are selected as the parent node. Other nodes are children nodes and send their data to the parent node. The proposed routing scheme improves network stability time and packet delivery to sink, according to our simulation results. Path loss is also investigated in this protocol and will be considered in future work.

Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks in Healthcare Applications.

Mobile healthcare service has become increasingly popular thanks to the significant advances in the wireless body area networks (WBANs). It helps medical professionals to collect patient’s healthcare data remotely and provides remote medical diagnosis. Since the health data are privacy-related, they should provide services with privacy-preserving, which should consider security and privacy at the same time. Recently, some lightweight patient healthcare authentication protocols were proposed for WBANs. However, we observed that they are vulnerable to tracing attacks because the patient uses the same identifier in each session, which could leak privacy-related information on the patient. To defeat the weakness, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving authentication protocol for WBANs in healthcare service. The proposed protocol is only based on one-way hash function and with exclusive-or operation, which are lightweight operations than asymmetric cryptosystem operations. We performed two rigorous formal security proofs based on BAN logic and ProVerif tool. Furthermore, comparison results with the relevant protocols show that the proposed protocol achieves more privacy and security features than the other protocols and has suitable efficiency in computational and communicational concerns.

A Comprehensive Survey of Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have emerged as a promising technology for health monitoring due to their high utility and important role in improving human health. WBANs consist of a number of small battery-operated biomedical sensor nodes placed on the body or implanted, which are used to monitor and transmit important parameters such as blood pressure, electrocardiogram (ECG), and electroencephalogram (EEG). WBANs have strict requirements on energy efficiency and reliability during data collection and transmission. The most appropriate layer to address these requirements is the MAC layer. Medium access control protocols play an essential role in controlling the operation of radio transceivers and significantly affect the power consumption of the whole network. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the most relevant and recent MAC protocols developed for WBANs. We discuss design requirements of a good MAC protocol for WBANs. We further review the different channel access mechanisms for WBANs. Then, we investigate the existing designed MAC protocols for WBANs with a focus on their features along with their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we summarize the results of this work and draw conclusions.

Wireless body area network (WBAN): A review of schemes and protocols

To provide practical solutions to the difficulties faced by current available medicinal service based frameworks, Vital information of patient ought to be conveyed to the concerned destination continuously in real time by means of the web which gives rise to need to a system which allows any patient to get monitored over internet with the help of a network called as Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) comprises of several sensor nodes that consume low power as compared to other sensing devices.. The utilization of these networks includes the assistance of human safety in various situations. Though WBAN is extremely useful in today scenario, several challenges need to be tackled before its deployment. This article provides a detailed study of various schemes and protocols used to deal with energy efficiency, fault tolerance, security and privacy. The study in this article also identifies challenges that need to be considered before the design and development of any protocol for WBAN.

A Study on the Wireless Body Area Network MAC Protocol Using Dynamic Superframe for e-Health IoT

One of the most remarkable applications of the Internet of Things is health monitoring. Wireless body area networks (WBANs) consist of several body sensors implanted in or place on a human body and a coordinator. One of the essential issues of WBANs is the design of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to improve system efficiency. In this paper, we modify the IEEE 802.15.4 standard MAC superframe structure and propose an energy-efficient MAC protocol for WBANs in the e-Health Internet of Things (IoT) systems. In this scheme, the time slots are divided into mini-slots. The lengths of the contention access period and the contention free period are both variable. By using this mechanism, the utility of time slots can be considerably increased.

Efficient Certificateless Online/Offline Signature Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have become more commonplace, including in healthcare settings. For example, in a healthcare WBAN deployment, body sensor units (BSUs) are used to sense and collect health-related and medical-related information prior to sending relevant information to the server for analysis that can subsequently inform treatment plan. Given the sensitivity of both data-at-rest and data-in-transit, data authentication is fundamental to the success of such systems. However, BSUs are generally resource constrained and, hence, conventional cryptographic algorithms are not practical. Therefore, in this article, we propose an efficient certificateless online/offline signature scheme and design a lightweight data authentication protocol for WBANs. We then evaluate the security and performance of our proposed scheme, where the security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme satisfies existential unforgeability under the random oracle model. Findings from the performance evaluation also demonstrate that our scheme incurs very low computational cost during the signing operations. In comparison to several other competing approaches, our proposed scheme achieves a significant reduction in computational cost (up to 89%) for the offline signer and supports batch verification to reduce the verifier's execution time. In addition, we also show that the signature size of our proposed scheme is similar to those of the conventional signature schemes.

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.

Optimized Energy Efficient and QoS Aware Routing Protocol for WBAN

The expansion of an average lifetime and increased cost of health analysis have resulted in effective methods for healthcare monitoring. A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is used for continuous monitoring of patients to enhance health care and quality of life. As the sensors worn on the human body have a small size, low transmission power and restricted battery, which necessitate the development of energy-efficient routing protocols for increasing the network lifetime. This paper proposes an Optimized Energy Efficient and Quality-of-Service aware Routing Protocol (OEEQR) to achieve longer network lifetime, energy efficiency, lower delay and high throughput. In the proposed protocol, the cost function with residual energy, distance and path loss as its parameters is optimized using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique. The proposed cost function determines the best feasible next hop to send the data to the sink.

A QoS-Based Medium Access Control Protocol for WBANs and Its Performance Evaluation

Nowadays, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are used in many fields. WBANs are described as small sensor nodes that communicate wirelessly and provide services to the personal area. Quality of Service (QoS) is an essential issue for WBANs due to the importance of human life. QoS problems can only be solved with a robust Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol in WBANs. To find a solution to this problem, developers performed many MAC protocols for WBANs. ISO/IEEE 11073 health informatics defines the standard of personal health information and purposes to provide interoperability between medical technologies. This paper presents a MAC protocol that provides ISO/IEEE 11073 communication standards with QoS support, bases on cross-layer architecture. We designed a slot assignment scheme, prioritization mechanism, admission control mechanism to provide QoS. The performance evaluation of the proposed MAC protocol is compared with IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 protocols by considering end-to-end delay, packet loss ratio, and throughput parameters, and it has achieved out performance. It is observed that the proposed protocol doesn't exceed 45 ms delay, reached 81% traffic load, and a maximum error rate of 0.162%.