Wireless Body Area Networks Scenarios Research Articles

Dual-Band Self-Complementary 5G Antenna for Wireless Body Area Network

A design of a self-complementary dual-band fifth-generation (5G) antenna for a wireless body area network (WBAN) has been presented in this paper. Like many other advantages, dual-band antennas have the benefit of being able to establish a reliable wireless connection in places that are frequently out of reach. The antenna operates at two popular 5G NR, FR-2 frequency bands: n257, or 28 GHz, and n260, or 39 GHz. FR-2 bands are prominent for high-speed data transactions within a limited range, which is perfect for WBAN applications. The proposed self-complementary single element design has a physical size of 6 mm × 8 mm × 1.59 mm and is designed with a Rogers RT6002 substrate with a dielectric constant of 2.94. In free space simulations, the antenna performed satisfactorily, achieving around 90% efficiency and having return losses of 16.32 dB and 20.47 dB at the lower and upper frequency bands sequentially. The antenna generated almost omnidirectional patterns at both frequencies with a peak gain of 4.74 dB. By placing the antenna next to a 3D human torso phantom that had been digitally created with accurate human body features, the design’s onbody performance was assessed. Onbody simulations produced favorable performance with a small dispersion from their peak values in some parameters, i.e., efficiency and reflection coefficients but produced more gains: 4.34 dBi at 28 GHz and 6.19 dBi at 39 GHz. For further distance-based investigation, the antenna was placed in five different positions relative to the torso. The test yields 67% efficiency with the minimum gap and 71% at the highest distance from the human body for the lowest band. Though the lower-frequency band produces better results with more gaps, the higher-frequency band performs consistently better in even the closest placement to the human body model by reaching more than 6 dB of gain with above 81% efficiency and wider than 10 GHz of bandwidth. The overall performance indicates this design can be a good solution to complex WBAN scenarios.

Wireless body area networks task offloading method combined with multiple communication and computing resources supported by MEC

AbstractIn recent years, mobile edge computing (MEC) has become a promising solution to solve the shortage of technical resources in wireless body area networks (WBANs). However, the existing research work has not fully utilized the communication and computing resources in WBANs scenarios. To solve this problem, a task offloading framework that combined with cellular, WiFi networks and device‐to‐device communications is proposed, that makes full use of resources to improve system reliability. Considering that a single MEC server may be overloaded by a large number of patients, the total task offloading cost and load variance is formulated into a multi‐objective optimization problem (MOOP). A non‐dominated sorting genetic algorithm with smart mobile device ‐ patient connection matrix (NSGA ‐SPCM) to solve the MOOP. In view that an SDM may connect multiple patients at the same time during chromosome crossing, the SPCM can quickly detect the unfeasible gene location and mutate it into viable. Simulation results show that the proposed framework and algorithm have good performance.

Implementation and experimental evaluation of dynamic capabilities in wireless body area networks: different setting parameters and environments

It is well known that a wireless body area network (WBAN) is a special proposed wireless sensor network (WSN) that can assist in monitoring physiological signals for the evaluation and planning of patient treatment. One of the most challenging issues for WBANs is communication reliability, with acceptable communication efficiency and packet loss. To obtain such network characteristics, collision-free data transmission in networks of wireless sensor nodes is an interesting research problem. In this paper, the experiments of dynamic capabilities in several WBAN scenarios are focused, where the novelty and major contribution of our tests is that the effects of packet inter-arrival times, packet sizes, and the number of nodes deployed in the network, including human movements, indoor and outdoor environments, and transmitter and receiver positions, are all taken into consideration and evaluated. This is achieved by implementing the WBAN using IEEE 802.15.4 low-power sensor nodes. Experimental results illustrate the significant factors that impact the communication reliability of WBANs as measured by the packet delivery ratio (PDR). The experimental results show that the diverse environment testbed can affect network performance for WBAN data transmission. Our findings also show that the best network reliability needs to be set at more than 15 ms in packet interval time to achieve over 90% PDR for every test scenario. More details of the experimental results related to WBAN reliability obtained from all test cases are also discussed and summarized in the paper. To the best of our knowledge, our findings can be useful for users and researchers to consider the optimal point for WBAN setting and configuration to achieve the communication reliability requirements and also to deploy and develop a more reliable WBAN system.

Rational Allocation of Guaranteed Time Slots to Support Real-Time Traffic in Wireless Body Area Networks

Background: The main requirement of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is on-time delivery of vital signs that are sensed through the delay-sensitive biological sensors that are implanted in the body of the patient being monitored by the central gateway. The Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol standard IEEE 802.15.4 supports real-time data delivery through its unique feature called Guaranteed Time Slot (GTS) under its beacon-enabled mode. This protocol is considered suitable for the WBAN Scenario. However, as per the standard, IEEE 802.15.4 uses a simple and straightforward First Come First Served (FCFS) mechanism to distribute GTS slots among the contender nodes. This kind of blindfolded allocation of GTS slots results in poor utilization of bandwidth and also prevents the delay-sensitive sensor nodes from effectively utilizing the contention-free slots. Objective: The main objective of this work is to provide a solution for the unfair allocation of GTS slots in the beacon-enabled mode of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard in WBAN. Method: We propose a Rational Allocation of Guaranteed Time Slot (RAGTS) protocol that distributes the available GTS slots based on the delay-sensitivity of the contender nodes. Results: A series of simulation experiments has been performed to assess the performance of our proposed RAGTS protocol. The simulations capture the dynamic nature of the real-time deadlines associated with sensor traffic. Through simulations, we show that our proposed RAGTS protocol appears to be more stable in terms of various performance metrics than that of the FCFS nature of the GTS allocation technique. Conclusion: In this article, we introduced the RAGTS scheme that enhances the real-time traffic feature of the beacon-enabled mode of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC.

BNS: A Framework for Wireless Body Area Network Realistic Simulations.

Simulation is a useful and common technique to evaluate the performance of networks when the implementation of a real scenario is not available. Specifically for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN), it is crucial to perform evaluations in environments as close as possible to the real conditions of use. To achieve that, simulations must include different protocol layers involved in WBAN and models close to reality to create realistic simulation environments for e-health applications. To satisfy these needs, this work presents the BNS framework, a flexible tool for WBAN simulations. The proposal is an extension of the Castalia framework, which includes: (1) a new wireless channel model considering real radio-propagation over the human body; (2) an updated implementation of the WBAN MAC protocol in Castalia, with functionalities and requirements in accordance with the IEEE 802.15.6 standard; (3) a new comprehensive and configurable mobility model for simulating intra-WBAN communication; (4) a temperature module based on the Pennes bioheat transfer equation, to model the temperature of a WBAN node based on the activity of the node; and (5) a Healthcare Application Layer that implements data representation and a communication protocol between Personal Health Devices (PHD) following the ISO/IEEE 11073 standard. Three use cases are presented, where WBAN scenarios are simulated and evaluated using the proposed BNS framework. Results show that BNS is a valid and flexible tool to evaluate WBAN solutions through simulation.

An approach to optimize performance of CM3A cooperative WBAN operating in UWB

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is growing enormously with the technical development of the internet of things (IOT). On body WBAN is one of the types in which sensors are located on the body of patient. Cooperative techniques are useful in mitigating the fading effect and improving the quality of the transmitted signal. In the current work, a mathematical model considering cooperative CM3A operating at ultra-wide band (UWB) (3.1–10.6 GHz) has been devised. A comparative performance analysis of received power and critical parameters like SNR, outage probability, probability of error, and the packet error rate has been carried out for cooperative and noncooperative scenarios. An objective function has been formulated to optimize link quality parameters using a particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO). Simulation results obtained reveals that performance of considered cooperative WBAN is better in comparison to non- cooperative WBAN. Further optimization improves the outage probability of cooperative WBAN by approximately 30 % and energy consumption is reduced by approx.5 %. Cooperative approach is beneficial for considered WBAN scenario.

Joint optimization of power control and time slot allocation for wireless body area networks via deep reinforcement learning

E-healthcare system based on wireless body area network (WBAN) promises to produce potential benefits in health-care industry. A major issue of such an on-body networked system is the energy efficiency, that is, how to improve the reliability and effectiveness of physiological data transmission with the energy constraints of tiny wireless sensors. Motivated by this, we consider an individual WBAN scenario, focusing on finding an adaptive time slot allocation and power control scheme to maximize the average energy efficiency for implementing the task of health monitoring. We formulate the maximization problem with latency and sensors’ energy budget constraints as a markov decision process (MDP). As a solution, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-based scheme to make a sequence decision for the MDP, which jointly optimizes power control and slot allocation. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is energy efficient and has a good convergence.

Impact of clustering in AODV routing protocol for wireless body area network in remote health monitoring system

<span>Proper selection of routing protocol in transmitting and receiving medical data in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is one of the approaches that would help in ensuring high network performances. However, a continuous monitoring of health status through sensing of various vital body signals by multiple biosensors could produce a bulk of medical data and lead to the increase of network traffic. Occurrence of high traffic could result to network’s congestion which have high tendency to loss some of important (critical) data and cause longer delay that would lead to false diagnosis of diseases. In order to analyze and validate this issue, Ad-Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) which is known as reactive routing protocol is evaluated in WBAN scenario through varying number of nodes and clusters. The presence of clustering helps in reducing the burden of the sink nodes in handling high traffics. The network’s performances of this protocol are measured in terms of end to end delay, percentage packet loss, throughput and energy consumption using Network Simulator (NS-2). Based on the experimental results, the presence of cluster helps in improving network performances by achieving reduction in delay, packet loss and energy consumption. However, low throughput is achieved as number of clusters are increase due to low duty cycle of the nodes.</span>

Secure Authentication and Group Key Distribution Scheme for WBANs Based on Smartphone ECG Sensor

As one of the crucial components in the emerging internet of things (IoT), wireless body area networks (WBANs) is capable of monitoring vital physiological and behavioral information of users through wearable sensors, offering a new paradigm for the next-generation healthcare systems. However, due to the inherent open wireless communicating characteristics, security and privacy issues for WBANs communication remain unsolved. Note that the deployed WBANs sensors are resource-restrained entities, which restricts its wide applications in medical environment. In this case, effective authentication scheme with efficient group key management strategy is of great significance. Moreover, with comparatively large computation ability and storage capacity, smartphone is able to perform as the vital data processing gateway for WBANs, especially in the upcoming 5G network implementation with superior transmission quality and speed. Furthermore, the WBAN sensors are responsible for continuous physiological monitoring, where the acquired biometric features could be adopted to the authentication process. For the above consideration, a secure certificateless biometric authentication and group key management for WBAN scenarios is proposed in this paper. In our design, user's smartphone takes the role of personal controller (PC) in traditional WBANs structure. The representative features of the gathered electrocardiogram (ECG) records are applied as the distinctive biometric parameter during authentication procedure. Hence efficient authentication towards participating sensors is enabled. Subsequently, fast group key management among all validated sensors is presented, where small modification is required for dynamic key updating mechanism in sensor side. Security analysis indicates that the proposed protocol can achieve desired security properties and provide resistance to various attacks. Performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol is efficient compared with the state-of-the-art WBAN authentication schemes.

Performance study of a fractal UWB MIMO antenna for on-body WBAN applications

In this paper, a fractal ultrawideband multiple-input–multiple-output antenna is proposed and its characteristics are studied in free space as well as in the proximity of on-body wireless body area network scenario. The performance of the wideband antennas are affected strongly in the proximity of the human body. Koch fractal geometry is used at the outer edges of basic octagonal geometry in the design, which helps to achieve desired miniaturization, wideband and stable radiation pattern. The presented antenna has a compact size of 25 mm × 40 mm. In addition, the effect of body tissues on antenna characteristics is analyzed by a four layered (skin, fat, muscle and bone) human tissue model. The comparative analysis of S21 is performed at a various body parts position such as abdomen, near forehead and chest with different antenna orientations.

Cross-layer designs for energy efficient wireless body area networks: a review

Cross-layer design is considered a powerful alternative to solve the complexities of wireless communication in wireless body area networks (WBAN), where the classical communication model has been shown to be inaccurate. Regarding the energy consumption problem, we have prepared a current survey of the most relevant scientific publications on energy-efficient cross-layer design for WBAN. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the advances in cross-layer approaches, protocols and optimizations aimed at increasing the network lifetime by saving energy in WBANs. Subsequently, we discuss the relevant aspects and shortcomings of these energy-efficient cross-layer techniques and point out the open research issues and challenges in WBAN cross-layer design. In this survey, we propose a taxonomy for cross-layer approaches to fit them into categories based on the protocols involved in the cross-layer scheme. A novel classification is included to clarify the theoretical concepts behind each cross-layer scheme; and to group similar approaches by establishing their differences from the other strategies reviewed. Our conclusion considers the aspects of mobility and channel modeling in WBAN scenarios as the directions of future cross-layer research for WBAN and telemedicine applications.

Development and Simulation of Enhanced Key Management Scheme for WBANs

The design and deployment of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have recently resulted from the use of sensors to measure the biometrics and movements of the human body. The development of such networks is imperative for modern telemedicine and e-health. Since WBANs are dealing with very sensitive information (i.e., medical data which has a direct impact on human life), security is an essential part of WBANs design. Indeed, key management plays pivotal role in ensuring security requirements in WBAN.
 In this paper, an enhanced version of a biometric-based distributed key management scheme is introduced. This scheme is designed for use in WBAN scenarios. It makes use of key refreshment schedules and distributes key management responsibility among all nodes in a WBAN in a fair manner. The scheme supports the use of biometric measurements to generate symmetric keys in WBANs via facilitating the work of biometric random number generators that can extract a random bit sequence from biological data to generate symmetric keys. A general description of the development of this scheme is given along with all phases of its operation. Furthermore, simulation results are presented with security analysis related to the resistance of the proposed scheme against some possible attacks.

Optimal design of energy-efficient and cost-effective wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) represent one of the most promising approaches for improving the quality of life, allowing remote patient monitoring and other healthcare applications. The deployment of a WBAN is a critical issue that impacts both the network lifetime and the total energy consumed by the network. This work investigates the optimal design of wireless body area networks by studying the joint data routing and relay positioning problem, in order to increase the network lifetime. To this end, we propose a mixed integer linear programming model, the Energy-Aware WBAN Design model, which optimizes the number and location of relays to be deployed and the data routing towards the sink, minimizing both the network installation cost and the energy consumed by wireless sensors and relays. We solve the proposed model in both realistic WBAN scenarios and general topologies, and compare the model performance to the most notable approaches proposed in the literature. Numerical results demonstrate that our model (1) provides a good tradeoff between the energy consumption and the number of installed relays, and (2) designs energy-efficient and cost-effective WBANs in a short computation time, thus representing an interesting framework for the dynamic WBAN design problem.

Coloring-Based Inter-WBAN Scheduling for Mobile Wireless Body Area Networks

In this study, random incomplete coloring (RIC) with low time-complexity and high spatial reuse is proposed to overcome in-between wireless-body-area-networks (WBAN) interference, which can cause serious throughput degradation and energy waste. Interference-avoidance scheduling of wireless networks can be modeled as a problem of graph coloring. For instance, high spatial-reuse scheduling for a dense sensor network is mapped to high spatial-reuse coloring; fast convergence scheduling for a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is mapped to low time-complexity coloring. However, for a dense and mobile WBAN, inter-WBAN scheduling (IWS) should simultaneously satisfy both of the following requirements: 1) high spatial-reuse and 2) fast convergence, which are tradeoffs in conventional coloring. By relaxing the coloring rule, the proposed distributed coloring algorithm RIC avoids this tradeoff and satisfies both requirements. Simulation results verify that the proposed coloring algorithm effectively overcomes inter-WBAN interference and invariably supports higher system throughput in various mobile WBAN scenarios compared to conventional colorings.